The effect of interpretation bias on the production of disambiguating prosody

Abstract

Syntactically ambiguous sentences are frequently strongly biased towards one meaning over another (for a review, see Gibson, 1991). This interpretation bias influences listeners? use of disambiguating prosody (Wales & Toner, 1979). The current study investigated the effect of bias strength on production. Interpretation bias strength were established for a heterogeneous set of 18 sentences in Choe and Redford (submitted). We selected a subset of 10 sentences for this study: half of the sentences had a strong interpretation bias; the other half had a weak interpretation bias. The sentences in each group were matched for ambiguity type. Ten native speakers of English were taught the alternate meanings of the ambiguous sentences, and then asked to disambiguate the meanings only using prosody. Temporal and F0 measures indicated that while all speakers differentiated between meanings in production, only sentences with weak interpretation biases were consistently prosodically disambiguated. Prosodic cues to structures were applied inconsistently to differentiate meaning in sentences with strong interpretation biases. We conclude that disambiguating prosody is grammaticalized only when required by the interpretative norms of the speech community. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.