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Prosody and Intention Recognition

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Book cover Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 46))

Abstract

Listeners face multiple challenges in mapping prosody onto intentions: The relevant intentions vary with the general context of an utterance (e.g., the speaker’s goals) and how prosodic contours are realized varies across speakers, accents, and speech conditions. We propose that listeners map acoustic information onto prosodic representations using (rational) probabilistic inference, in the form of generative models, which are updated on the fly based on the match between predictions and the input. We review some ongoing work, motivated by this framework, focusing on the “It looks like an X” construction, which, depending on the pitch contour and context, can be interpreted as “It looks like an X and it is” or “It looks like an X and it isn’t.” We use this construction to investigate the hypothesis that pragmatic processing shows the pattern of adaptation effects that is expected if the mapping of speech onto intentions involves rational inference.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A preliminary report of these three studies, including the methodological details and results, is presented in Kurumada et al. (2012). A longer manuscript reporting these results is under review (Kurumada et al. n.d.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Meliora Hall, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA

    Michael K. Tanenhaus, Chigusa Kurumada & Meredith Brown

Authors
  1. Michael K. Tanenhaus
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  2. Chigusa Kurumada
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  3. Meredith Brown
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Correspondence to Michael K. Tanenhaus .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

    Lyn Frazier

  2. Department of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Edward Gibson

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Tanenhaus, M., Kurumada, C., Brown, M. (2015). Prosody and Intention Recognition. In: Frazier, L., Gibson, E. (eds) Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12961-7_6

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