Prosody and the Interpretation of Hierarchically Ambiguous Discourse

Although significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively little is known about prosody's effect on discourse interpretation. This article explores the ability of synthetic manipulations of prosody to bias interpretation of discourse ambiguities where a first sentence is linked to two following sentences either by coordinating (Narration) or subordinating (Elaboration) discourse relations. In Experiment 1, manipulations of pitch, pause duration, and intensity were found to influence discourse interpretation. In Experiment 2, subsets of these prosodic contrasts were compared. A bias for more coordination interpretations was found only for subsets with rising pitch at the end of the first sentence, including one where that was the only contrast, showing that rising pitch alone can disambiguate discourse. Participants also expressed more confidence when choosing a coordination interpretation after hearing a rise or a subordination interpretation after hearing a fall. Results demonstrate that the discourse disambiguation ability of prosody goes beyond ambiguities of scope and reference to hierarchical ambiguities of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations

Adverbial · Cognitive psychology · Duration (music · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Narrative · Prosody · Sentence · Subordination (linguistics · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology

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