Emphasis and Duration in Signaling Scalar Alternatives

THE ROLE OF DURATION IN SIGNALING SCALAR ALTERNATIVE SETS Kate Sandberg and Jennifer Cole 1

PROSODIC EMPHASIS AND GRADABLE ADJECTIVES The tree is TALL. encourages pragmatic inferences about alternatives (Krifka, 2008; Rooth, 1985; Rooth, 1992) Encourages inferences about the locations of thresholds on measurement scales of ordered degrees (Kennedy and McNally, 2007; Bolinger, 2013) Intensity Contrast The tree is tall, but not wide. The tree is very tall. Question: How does a listener determine which type of inference to draw when hearing an emphasized gradable adjective? 2

HOW DO WE EMPHASIZE? Emphasis for Contrast Emphasis for Intensity (Kohler, 2006) (Kohler, 2006) -Rising pitch movements (i.e., pitch accents) -L+H*: initial low pitch target followed by a sharp pitch rise (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg, 1990) - longer durations than those typical of pitch-accented syllables (Niebuhr, 2010) Proposal: The acoustic realization of emphasis can resolve ambiguity about the intent behind a speaker s use of emphasis, with increases in duration encouraging intensification inferences relative to contrastive ones. 3

Auditory Stimuli 20 scalar adjectives (e.g., striped, spotted, happy, rainy, spicy) EXPERIMENT: DESIGN Long Intensified Short Long The weather is rainy. Contrastive Short Neutral No Change 4

EXPERIMENT: PROCEDURE Intensifying Contrastive 5

Experiment: Results Main Effect of Duration Frequency (Intensification) Intensified Response Pitch Contrastive Intensified Significant Pitch x Duration Interaction Main Effect of Pitch 6 N = 39 Response ~ Pitch * Duration + (1|Adjective) + (1|Participant)

CONCLUSIONS Increased duration promotes an intensifying interpretation over a contrastive one. Intensifying pitch promotes an intensifying interpretation when increased duration is not present. Participants are using acoustic cues involved in the production of emphasis to resolve ambiguity about emphasized gradable adjectives Thank you to: Chun-Liang Chang for his help building the online experiment Members of the ProsD lab at Northwestern Nicole Gotzner and the Scales in Language Processing and Acquisition Lab for their feedback 7

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