John M. Tomlinson

Intonation and pragmatic enrichment: how intonation constrains ad-hoc scalar inferences

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding and demonstrates that the facilitation is caused by early derivation of the implicature in the L+H* condition. We attribute the effect to a link between L+H* and pragmatic considerations, such as speaker knowledge effects, or the saliency of alternatives relevant to the computation of implicatures. More generally our findings illustrate how intonation interacts at a cognitive level with pragmatic inference.

The perceptual nature of stress shifts

According to the rhythm rule in metrical phonology, a words stress alternates from the second syllable to the first when followed by a word with first syllable stress, a situation also known as a stress clash. For example, the second-syllable stressed word sixTEEN will be produced as SIXteen in the phrase SIXteen CANdles. Using pseudo-words in different rhythmic contexts, we demonstrate that stress clash resolution has a strong perceptual component and can be an auditory illusion. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to misattribute stress in a clash condition (sixTEEN heard as SIXteen in sixTEEN CANdles) than in isolation (sixTEEN) or in a non-clash condition (sixTEEN caNALS). In Experiment 2, we failed to find support for the hypothesis that nuclear stress drove these ratings. We discuss these findings in light of various theories and mechanisms for parsing spontaneous speech.

Do you believe what eye believe

Speaker belief is an essential component how interlocutors interact, according to information structure and other theories of conversational interaction. We tested this assumption by investigating unscripted spontaneous speech patterns in an experimental paradigm that manipulated speakers belief states about shared visual information. We found that interlocutors were more likely to use references based on content (rather than appearance) in mismatched belief conditions. Also, final rising pitch contours (confirmation contours) seemed to be used more when interlocutors share the same visual common ground. These contours seem to elicit more back-channels than final falling pitch contours. Our results provide evidence that situational variables such as visual common ground strongly effect how speakers create their utterances.