Universität zu Köln

Roettger, Timo B. and Rimland, Kim (2020). Listeners' adaptation to unreliable intonation is speaker-sensitive. Cognition, 204. AMSTERDAM: ELSEVIER. ISSN 1873-7838

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Abstract

Variable linguistic environments require the ability to quickly update expectations and behavior including speech comprehension. This adaptive capacity is key to understanding how listeners successfully recognize speaker intentions in light of the ubiquitous variability in speech. The present study investigates how listeners' real-time sentence comprehension adapts to speaker-specific prosodic variability. In two forced choice mouse tracking experiments, listeners had to identify a visual referent guided by pre-recorded instructions. When exposed to a speaker that uses unconventional pitch accent placement, listeners discard intonational information for that speaker, but keep using intonation to resolve the referential ambiguity for another speaker that places pitch accents conventionally. These results show for the first time that intonationally guided sentence comprehension adapts in a speaker-sensitive way. The study further provides valuable first insights into the temporal unfolding of this adaptation process. Listeners first attribute unconventional patterns to the context, thus discarding the informational value of intonation for both speakers. After sufficient evidence, however, listeners start attributing unexpected patterns to only the unconventional speaker. Materials, data, and scripts can be retrieved here: http://osf.io/fdpg4

Item Type:	Journal Article
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Roettger, Timo B. UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Rimland, Kim UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-313942
DOI:	10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104372
Journal or Publication Title:	Cognition
Volume:	204
Date:	2020
Publisher:	ELSEVIER
Place of Publication:	AMSTERDAM
ISSN:	1873-7838
Language:	English
Faculty:	Unspecified
Divisions:	Unspecified
Subjects:	no entry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language PERCEPTUAL ADAPTATION; SPEECH-PERCEPTION; SPOKEN-LANGUAGE; PROSODY; ACCENT; COMPREHENSION; INFORMATION Multiple languages Psychology, Experimental Multiple languages
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/31394