Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Michael Franke (Institute for Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück)

Title: Listeners rationally adapt how they predictively process intonation when exposed to unreliable input

Abstract: Intonation plays an integral role in comprehending spoken language. It is also remarkably variable, often exhibiting only probabilistic mappings between form and function. Despite this apparent uncertainty, listeners can rapidly integrate intonational information to predictively map a given pitch accent onto the speaker’s likely referential intentions. We use manual response dynamics (mouse-tracking) to investigate two questions: (i) whether listeners draw predictive inferences from the presence and absence of an intonational marking and (ii) whether and how listeners adapt their online interpretation of intonational cues when these are reliable or stochastically unreliable. Our results are compatible with the assumption that comprehenders rapidly and rationally integrate all available intonational information, that they expect reliable intonational information initially, and that they adapt these initial expectations gradually during exposition to unreliable input. We explore the predictions of a Bayesian model of rational incremental belief update and observe a good fit to the empirical data.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Andres Karjus

Centre for Language Evolution