University of Osnabrück, Institute of Cognitive Science, Wachsbleiche 27 (building 50), 49090 Osnabrück, Germany.
University of Cologne, IfL-Phonetik, Herbert-Lewin-Str 6, 50931 Köln, Germany.
Cognition. 2020 Nov;204:104372. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104372. Epub 2020 Jun 29.
Variable linguistic environments require the ability to quickly update expectations and behavior including speech comprehension. This adaptive capacity is key to understanding how listeners successfully recognize speaker intentions in light of the ubiquitous variability in speech. The present study investigates how listeners' real-time sentence comprehension adapts to speaker-specific prosodic variability. In two forced choice mouse tracking experiments, listeners had to identify a visual referent guided by pre-recorded instructions. When exposed to a speaker that uses unconventional pitch accent placement, listeners discard intonational information for that speaker, but keep using intonation to resolve the referential ambiguity for another speaker that places pitch accents conventionally. These results show for the first time that intonationally guided sentence comprehension adapts in a speaker-sensitive way. The study further provides valuable first insights into the temporal unfolding of this adaptation process. Listeners first attribute unconventional patterns to the context, thus discarding the informational value of intonation for both speakers. After sufficient evidence, however, listeners start attributing unexpected patterns to only the unconventional speaker. Materials, data, and scripts can be retrieved here: http://osf.io/fdpg4.
多变的语言环境要求人们具备快速更新期望和行为的能力，包括言语理解。这种适应能力是理解听众如何根据言语的普遍可变性成功识别说话者意图的关键。本研究调查了听众如何实时适应说话者特定的韵律变化来理解句子。在两项强制选择鼠标追踪实验中，听众必须根据预录的指令识别视觉参照。当听众接触到使用非常规重音放置的说话者时，他们会丢弃该说话者的语调信息，但会继续使用语调来解决另一位常规使用重音的说话者的指代歧义。这些结果首次表明，语调引导的句子理解会以一种对说话者敏感的方式进行适应。该研究进一步为这一适应过程的时间展开提供了有价值的初步见解。听众首先将非常规模式归因于语境，从而丢弃了两个说话者的语调信息的价值。然而，在有足够的证据后，听众开始仅将意外模式归因于非常规说话者。材料、数据和脚本可在此处检索：http://osf.io/fdpg4。
