In this dissertation, I investigate how people navigate ambiguity in everyday speech, with a focus on quantifier-negation sentences. Combining corpus analysis, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling in the Rational Speech Act framework, I explore preferred interpretations of quantifier-negation and examine the contexts and prosodies…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

This study investigated whether L2 English learners' prosodic properties in speech acts change as they are immersed in the English-speaking academic community over time, and if so, what individual and contextual factors (proficiency, orientation to language study, and target language contact) potentially affect these changes. Forty-seven Japanese…

Context and discourse intonation have major influence on intended meaning in English-medium product advertisements on radio and television in Nigeria. Previous studies on Nigerian English phonology have confirmed the appropriate use of stress and intonation as the main challenge which many Nigerian speakers of English as a second language hardly…

This paper reports the results of an experiment that elicits contextual effects on Rising and Falling accents in Standard Serbian, with the goal of determining their acoustic correlates and their phonological representation. Materials systematically vary the distance between pitch accents, inducing "tone crowding," in order to identify the…

This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

In order to explore the influence of context on the phonetic design of talk-in-interaction, we investigated the pitch characteristics of short turns (insertions) that are produced by one speaker between turns from another speaker. We investigated the hypothesis that the speaker of the insertion designs her turn as a pitch match to the prior turn…

This dissertation is about what prosody contributes to dialogue interpretation. The view of prosody developed in this account is based on detailed quantitative investigations of the prosodic forms and interpretations of cue word and declarative responses, specifically with respect to the distribution and interpretation of terminal pitch rises.…

Sarcasm, or sarcastic irony, involves expressing a message that is often opposite of the literal meaning of what is being said, in a way that may sound bitter, or caustic (Gibbs, 1986). In the past, sarcasm has been viewed as a method of introducing the possibility of alternative interpretations of a discourse, by creating ambiguity as to the…

This study investigated identification of fragmented Mandarin tones by non-native listeners. Monosyllabic Mandarin words were digitally processed to generate intact, silent-center, center-only, and onset-only syllables. The syllables were recorded with two carrier phrases such that the offset of the carrier tone and the onset of the target tone…

This article presents the results of a longitudinal study investigating the pronunciation of American students learning German, focusing on the importance of stress, rhythm, and intonation for a native-like accent in German. The present study investigated German pronunciation for two groups of American students from the Midwest. Students in one…