Accommodation to Speaking Style in the Interpretation of Intonational Cues

This paper examines Schafer's (1997) Interpretive Domain Hypothesis
(IDH) about the influence on processing of two levels of prosodic
states that ``[a]n intonational phrase boundary defines a point at
which forms any as yet outstanding semantic/pragmatic evaluation and
terial within the intonational phrase.'' Replicating Schafer's ded
somewhat different results, which are nonetheless consistent with an
intermediate phrase boundaries and intonational phrase boundaries are
ly by the processor. The results also provide some preliminary
evidence y be sensitive to the prosodic characteristics of speaking
style.

An ongoing experiment builds on this first set of results and
investigates listener accommodation to speaking style in the
interpretation of prosodic cues. It adapts the design of the Schafer
(1997) experiment to test whether listener interpretion of prosodic
phrase boundaries depends on the relative distribution of such
boundaries in a set of priming texts. When listening to speech
characterized by a dense distribution of intonational boundary tones
(newscaster speech, for example), a listener may not interpret all
intonational boundaries as cues to semantic/pragmatic integration,
since to do so may be inefficient.


If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact:

Ralf Benzmueller

This seminar series is jointly organized by the Department of
Computational Linguistics and Phonetics and the European Post-Graduate
College in Language Technology and Cognitive Systems.

A current version of the program for this term can be found at:

http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/colloquium/