Navigating variability in the linguistic signal [electronic resource] : learning to interpret contrastive prosody

Prosody is a powerful tool for conveying information beyond that conveyed in the words and phrases constituting a sentence (e.g., nuclear accenting of contrasted items: YOU shouldn't have done that vs. You shouldn't have done THAT). Past studies have proposed links between prosodic representations (pitch accents and intonations in particular) and the semantics and pragmatics of sentences. However, no study has explicitly accounted for how listeners navigate variability across speakers and contexts in order to arrive at intended interpretations. In addition, there is a puzzle in the literature of acquisition of prosody. Preschoolers show difficulties in pragmatic interpretations of prosodic contours even though they can use the same contours in their own production. In this dissertation, I first propose a psycholinguistic approach to the comprehension of prosody in adults. Specifically, I investigate English speakers' pragmatic interpretations of contrastive prosody through large-scale judgment surveys and an eye-tracking experiment. Drawing on insights from recent work on phonetic categorization and adaptation, I demonstrate that the prosodic comprehension goes beyond categorical mappings between acoustic properties of speech and prosodic representations. The process is best represented as inferences about how a particular speaker employs prosody, as well as other linguistic devices, to convey intended meanings. I then report three behavioral experiments with four-year-olds. The results suggest that preschoolers can engage in prosody-based pragmatic inferences if the context provides sufficient support for them. Furthermore, I find that preschoolers' interpretation of prosody involves principled pragmatic inferencing (what would the speaker have said if she had intended another meaning?), proposed for early word learning. The picture emerging from the current experiments contrasts with previous work: Through rich contextual inferences, four-year olds are able to bootstrap their interpretation of prosodic information. The main finding of the present dissertation is that listeners flexibly adjust their interpretations of prosodic contours by integrating high-level contextual expectations and low-level distributional information in the acoustic signal. Ultimately, the current discussion highlights the importance of approaching prosodic comprehension as a dynamic and adaptive process. Listeners — adults and children alike — constantly evaluate linguistic signals against underlying representations, and the outcomes of the evaluation are used to optimize the representations to best represent the current input. Thus the present study constitutes part of a larger inquiry in the psychology of language comprehension: How do listeners learn and maintain flexible mappings between variable linguistic signals and abstract and stable representations?.

Keywords: Linguistics.
Advisor: Clark Eve V. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Frank Michael C. (Professor of human biology) advisor. Thesis advisor
Jurafsky Dan
Sumner Meghan advisor. Thesis advisor