How Does the Absence of Shared Knowledge Between Interlocutors Affect the Production of French Prosodic Forms?

International audienceWe examine the hypothesis that modelling the addressee in spoken interaction affects the production of prosodic forms by the speaker. This question was tested in an interactive paradigm that enabled us to measure prosodic variations at two levels: the global/acoustic level and the phonological one. We used a semi-spontaneous task in which French speakers gave instructions to addressees about where to place a cross between different objects (e.g., Tu mets la croix entre la souris bordeau et la maison bordeau; ‘You put the cross between the red mouse and the red house’). Each trial was composed of two noun-adjective fragments and the target was the second fragment. We manipulated (i) whether the two interlocutors shared or didn’t share the same objects and (ii) the informational status of targets to obtain variations in abstract prosodic phrasing. We found that the absence of shared knowledge between interlocutors affected the speaker’s production of prosodic forms at the global/acoustic level (i.e., pitch range and speech rate) but not at the phonological one (i.e., prosodic phrasing). These results are consistent with a mechanism in which global prosodic variations are influenced by audience design because they reflect the way that speakers help addressees to understand speech