A Rise by any other name : an investigation of the production and comprehension of rising (and falling) intonation in questions

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2016.Variability is ubiquitous in language, including in the use of intonation. Even in cases where the mapping between intonation and meaning appears to be relatively straightforward, speakers are not consistent in how they use intonational contours to signal their intentions. Despite this, listeners are able to rapidly infer a speaker’s intended meaning from their intonation. I investigate the nature of this process by focusing on the relationship between rising intonation and noninterrogative questions. First, I investigate the use of rising intonation in the so-called “declarative questions.” I argue that to conduct such an investigation we must first operationalize the notion of “question” by identifying utterances more specifically as information-seeking. I show that declarative questions as defined by this criterion do show the established trend in that they are more likely to end with rising intonation as compared to falling. However, I do not replicate previous results arguing that these utterances are more likely to end with rising intonation compared to their interrogative counterparts. I argue for the importance of investigating spontaneously produced questions so that we have an accurate understanding of the variability that exists and the factors that condition it. Second, I investigate the online comprehension of rising and falling intonation. Participants are eyetracked while they play a targeted language game that requires them to perform different actions based on whether they interpret a speaker’s utterance as a question or a statement, which they must infer from the intonational contour alone. I show that listeners process the boundary tones of contours rapidly, from the earliest possible moment in the speech signal. More specifically I argue that listeners infer the identity of the contour by virtue of key “turning points” in the contour. I conclude that listeners process and incorporate information from intonational contours just as rapidly as they do other aspects of prosody and the speech signal in general. Taken together, these results contribute to our understanding with regard to the kinds of variability that are inherent in intonation in naturally produced discourse and how listeners might manage such variability during online comprehensio