Comparative Studies

1. 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:

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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)

6. 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

7. How do other languages use intonation to convey information? • Syntactic ambiguity • Semantic ambiguity • Discourse phenomena • ‘Paralinguistic’ information

8. 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”

9. 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

10. 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

11. Conclusion: some contours can ‘freeze’ a pragmatic interpretation?

12. 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:

13. 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

14. Forced choice task: uncertainty or incredulity? • Results: F0 and spectral features influence uncertainty/incredulity distinction although amplitude and duration also differ