Meghan E. Armstrong

Accounting for intonational form and function in Puerto Rican Spanish polar questions

Abstract Many varieties of Romance show more than one intonation contour available for polar question (PQ) marking. Understanding the pragmatic licensing conditions for these contours is no easy task. Experimental work has tended to account for the variation in terms of dichotomies like information-seeking vs. confirmation-seeking or neutral vs. biased. In this paper I use production data to argue that different languages and dialects will encode different types of information intonationally in PQs, but that the type of information that we find encoded through intonation is quite similar to the type of information encoded through sentence-final particles in languages like Cantonese or Lao. These meanings lie on an epistemic gradient, and the points on the gradient that are encoded linguistically through intonation are language-specific (i.e. language X encodes meaning A, but language Y might encode meaning B, or meanings A & B, etc.). I explore three contours in Puerto Rican Spanish, their phonetic implementations, and their meanings with respect to this epistemic gradient. I argue that we should keep in mind the range of possible meanings of SFPs in other languages in order to refine our methodology in a way that allows us to make better predictions about the pragmatic division of labor among intonation contours, specifically for PQs.

Production of Mental State Intonation in the Speech of Toddlers and Their Caretakers

ABSTRACT It is well known that mental state verbs are difficult to acquire, but little is known about the acquisition of mental state language encoded through intonation. Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has at least three intonation contours available for marking polar questions (PQs): ¡H*L% marks an utterance as a PQ; H+L*L%, in addition to doing the former, conveys that the speaker has a belief about the (p)roposition and L*HL% marks the utterance as a PQ in addition to marking the speaker’s disbelief regarding p. A longitudinal study of two PRS-acquiring children (1;07–3;06) and their caretakers was carried out, analyzing 661 PQs from child speech and 4,574 from child-directed speech. Results show that while all three contours are used in child-directed speech, children almost categorically produce the contour that does not convey any specific mental state. Almost no tokens of the contour conveying that the speaker has a belief about a proposition were found in child speech (4/661 total PQs), and these only appeared after 2;08. No felicitous, nonimitative uses of the contour that conveys a speaker’s disbelief were found in child speech. Like other mental state language, intonation conveying epistemic information appears to emerge relatively late in child production.

Experimental Evidence for the Role of Intonation in Evidential Marking

This paper investigates the role of intonation in the marking of directly-perceived information in Majorcan Catalan polar questions. We conducted a perception experiment in which a total of 72 participants were introduced to a set of twins who were exposed to different types of evidence for a given p(roposition). One twin inferred p based on direct sensory information (via one of the five senses), while the other had been told that p by a third party, that is, reported information. Participants listened to a set of discourse contexts that ended in critical stimuli with three attested combinations of particle/intonation in this variety of Catalan: (1) polar questions produced with a falling nuclear contour ¡H+L* L%; (2) polar questions headed with the particle que ‘that’ produced with ¡H+L* L%; and (3) polar questions headed with the particle que and produced with a rise-fall L+H* L%. After hearing the stimulus, participants had to decide which of the twins had uttered the question–the one who inferred a proposition (p) based on direct sensory information or the one who had been told p by a third party. The results show that listeners very consistently associate the que + L+H* L% combination with inferences drawn from direct sensory evidence as opposed to reported evidence. This shows that particles may work in tandem with intonation to convey the information source. Importantly, we show that intonation is a part of grammar that may be recruited for evidential strategies.

Children’s processing of morphosyntactic and prosodic cues in overriding context-based hypotheses: an eye tracking study

Abstract This research explores children’s ability to integrate contextual and linguistic cues. Prior work has shown that children are not able to weigh contextual information in an adult-like way and that between the age of 4 and 6 they show difficulties in revising a hypothesis they have made based on early-arriving linguistic information in sentence processing. Therefore we considered children’s ability to confirm or override a context-based hypothesis based on linguistic information. Our objective in this study was to test (1) children’s (ages 4–6) ability to form a hypothesis based on contextual information, (2) their ability to override such a hypothesis based on linguistic information and (3) how children are able to use different types of linguistic cues (morphosyntactic versus prosodic) to confirm or override the initial hypothesis. Results from both offline (pointing) and online (eye tracking) tasks suggest that children in this age group indeed form hypotheses based on contextual information. Age effects were found regarding children’s ability to override these hypotheses. Overall, 4-year-olds were not shown to be able to override their hypotheses using linguistic information of interest. For 5- and 6-year-olds, it depended on the types of linguistic cues that were available to them. Children were better at using morphosyntactic cues to override an initial hypothesis than they were at using prosodic cues to do so. Our results suggest that children slowly develop the ability to override hypotheses based on early-arriving information, even when that information is extralinguistic and contextual. Children must learn to weight different types of cues in an adult-like way. This developmental period of learning to prioritize different cues in an adult-like way is consistent with a constraint-based model of learning.

Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual’s belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3–5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM) ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included age, condition and success on the ToM task. Performance improved with age, and was significantly better for the multimodal condition compared to both unimodal conditions, suggesting that even though unimodal cues were useful to children, the presence of reinforcing information for the multimodal condition was more effective for detecting disbelief. However, results also point to the development of intonational and gestural comprehension in tandem. Children that passed the ToM task significantly outperformed those that failed it for all conditions, showing that children who can attribute a false belief to another individual may more readily access these intonational and gestural cues.

Intonational polar question markers and implicature in American English and Majorcan Catalan

We offer an experimental approach to the study of the types of implicatures generated by polar question intonation in American English and Majorcan Catalan, which is rising and falling, respectively. In a categorization task, we show that discourse context affects whether listeners perceive utterances produced with the polar question markers (PQMs) to be declaratives versus questions. Results from an intention identification task show that PQMs in specific discourse contexts generate pragmatic implicatures, but that the “questioning” meaning of PQMs seems to persist, suggesting that PQMs give rise to conventional implicatures. While some language-specific differences were identified, results suggest that regardless of the direction of the contour, PQMs may generate similar types of implicatures cross-linguistically, and should be investigated with a larger sampling of languages.