Encoding and decoding of meaning through structured variability in intonational speech prosody [post]

Andrés Buxó-Lugo, chigusa kurumada
2019 unpublished
Speech prosody, the rhythm and intonation in particular, plays an important role in communication of meaning. Rising vs. falling intonation contours signaling the speaker's indented communicative meanings (i.e., asking a question vs. making a statement) has been widely recognized as a primary example of such prosody. However, what appears to be a straightforward mapping between acoustic features of prosody and hypothesized meanings in fact presents a challenge to the human perceptual and
more » ... tional mechanisms. Perceptible features of prosody vary across contexts (e.g., talkers), creating ubiquitous ambiguity in the mapping. Here, we first characterize the structured nature of the variability in intonational speech prosody used to signal a question vs. a statement in English. We then demonstrate that the listener can learn to adapt their expectations about the prosody-meaning mapping according to an inferred underlying structure of the environmental input. We argue that the rich and dynamic representations of the prosodic input allow listeners to infer the mapping that is most likely given characteristics of a current context.
doi:10.31234/osf.io/9y7xj fatcat:a73sqvjwtfgbnbqw7gsuba7cei