• Avesani et al 1995 ; Hirschberg&Avesani 1997
• Production studies comparing English, Italian and Spanish speakers (4 per language) and then English and Italian
• Potentially ambiguous utterances embedded in contexts to disambiguate:
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I know William very well. Since his girlfriend left him, he’s done nothing but drink. It’s been such a long time since his separation, that he’s used to living alone. Now, William doesn’t drink because he’s unhappy . He drinks because he’s an alcoholic.
There’s something about William that puzzles me.
When he’s happy, he has a good time with his friends, and certainly he doesn’t dislike drinking. I think I understand what’s wrong. William doesn’t drink because he’s unhappy .
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Conozco a Guillermo muy bien. Desde que su novia le dejo, no ha hecho nada mas que beber. Despues de tanto tiempo de su separacion, se ha acostumbrado a vivir solo. Ahora, Guillermo no bebe porque esta triste . Simplement, porque es un alcoholico.
Ha algo de Guillermo que no me convence. Cuando le veo feliz, se que se lo pasa, bien con sus amigos, y que no le desagrada beber. Creo que se lo que le pasa.
Guillermo no bebe porque esta triste .
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• Target utterances excised and labeled for
– Intonational contour
– Relative prominence of pitch accents
• Different ambiguity contexts compared within languages to find common patterns
• Common patterns compared across languages
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• Scope of negation similarly disambiguated between wide and narrow readings by variation of intonational phrasing (one phrase vs. two)
– Spanish and Italian speakers also varied nuclear stress placement (on verb for wide)
– English speakers also used continuation rise for wide, falling for narrow
Bill doesn’t drink because he’s unhappy.
• PP-attachment disambiguated by phrasing variation
(for Italian speakers)
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• Quantifier scope disambiguated by varying nuclear stress placement and phrases (for Italian, Spanish, 2
English subjects)
• Association with focus: only consistently disambiguated by all three
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How do other languages use intonation to convey information?
• Syntactic ambiguity
• Semantic ambiguity
• Discourse phenomena
• ‘Paralinguistic’ information
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• Direct vs. Indirect Speech Acts
– Illocutionary force (e.g. asking)
– Perlocutionary effect (e.g…..)
– Can you open that window?
• Wh-questions
– ‘Real’:
• “tilde contour” – why?
• “hat pattern”
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– Negative-implicating rhetorical:
• Hat pattern (if second accent highest)
• Evidence?
– Surprise/redundancy: The blackboard’s painted orange!
– How do we conclude that any intonation contour “means” X?
• YNQs:
– ‘Real’: rising or falling
– Indirect request: plateau or falling
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• Production studies: recorded read skits
– Tilde  real wh-q
– Neg-implicating wh: second accent more prominent than first
• Perception studies: match recording to context
– Tilde  real wh-q and not other
– Late peak  either
– Terminal rise  real ynq
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• Conclusion: some contours can ‘freeze’ a pragmatic interpretation?
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• The question: why does one contour have different meanings?
– Uncertainty/incredulity or lack of speaker commitment to some scalar value
– When will it mean one over the other?
• Hypothesis: variation in F0, amplitude, duration, voice quality
• Experiment:
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– Record same sentence with each interpretation (pretest)
– Analyze each token to extract acoustic and prosodic features of hypothesis
– Resynthesize tokens exchanging all possible combinations of F0, RMS, duration and spectral features of ‘uncertainty’ tokens with
‘incredulity’ tokens
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• Forced choice task: uncertainty or incredulity?
• Results: F0 and spectral features influence uncertainty/incredulity distinction although amplitude and duration also differ
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