Comparative Studies 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 01 14 19 1 English 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 01 14 19 2 Spanish 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 01 14 19 3 Analysis 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 01 14 19 4 Results 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 01 14 19 5 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 01 14 19 6 How do other languages use intonation to convey information Syntactic ambiguity Semantic ambiguity Discourse phenomena Paralinguistic information 01 14 19 7 Sag Liberman on Intonation and Indirect Speech Acts 75 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 01 14 19 8 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 01 14 19 9 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 01 14 19 10 Conclusion some contours can freeze a pragmatic interpretation 01 14 19 11 Hirschberg Ward 92 Rise fall rise L H L H 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 01 14 19 12 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 01 14 19 13 Forced choice task uncertainty or incredulity Results F0 and spectral features influence uncertainty incredulity distinction although amplitude and duration also differ 01 14 19 14
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