The effects of addressee attention on prosodic prominence

Abstract

How do speakers accommodate distracted listeners? Specifically, how does prosody change when speakers know that their addressees are multitasking? Speakers might use more acoustically prominent words for distracted addressees, to ensure that important information is communicated. Alternatively, speakers might disengage from the task and use less prominent pronunciations with distracted addressees. A further question is whether prosodic prominence changes globally or if there are effects specific to the most relevant information. We studied these effects in two instruction-giving experiments. Speakers instructed listeners to move objects to locations on a board. In the distraction condition, addressees were also completing a demanding secondary computer task; in the attentive condition they paid full attention. Results demonstrated that speakers modify their speech for distracted listeners, and in an instruction-giving task they specifically use more acoustically prominent (longer) pronunciations for distracted listeners. This effect was localised to the most task-relevant information: the object to be moved.

Articulatory and lexical repetition effects on durational reduction: speaker experience vs. common ground

“…Bard et al, 2000;Bard & Aylett, 2004). This effect joins other findings that duration is modulated on the basis of audience knowledge or behaviour Galati & Brennan, 2010;Rosa et al, 2013).…”

“…Some studies show that listener knowledge or attention has no effect (Bard & Aylett, 2004) others show it does (Rosa et al, 2013), and others show effects limited to intelligibility ratings but not duration (Galati & Brennan, 2010), or only planning regions . This raises questions about exactly which kinds of information about addressees affect speakers' pronunciations, and how they relate to the speakers' own internal processes.…”

“…The strongest evidence that speakers use acoustic reduction for listeners comes from another study, using the same paradigm as Arnold et al (2012), in which speakers gave instructions to listeners who were either attentive or distracted with a secondary task (Rosa, Finch, Bergeson, & Arnold, 2013). Speakers pronounced the target word with longer duration in the distracted condi tion, e.g.…”

Prosody and information structure in a tone language: an investigation of Mandarin Chinese

“…For example, in instruction-giving tasks where participants gave instructions to confederates about where to place objects (e.g. 'the teapot goes on red'), longer pronunciations were used for the determi ner when the addressees were not anticipating them (Arnold, Kahn, & Pancani, 2012) and for the object to be moved when the addressees were multitasking (Rosa, Finch, Bergeson, & Arnold, 2013). In addition, Ito and Speer (2006) showed that if the addressee makes a mistake, the correction by the speaker is produced with a contrastive accent.…”

Synthesising meaning and processing approaches to prosody: performance matters

“…For example, Baumann and Grice (2006) suggest that a pitch accent is used to mark either a) the degree of activation of the referent in “the assumed (immediate) consciousness of the listener,” (p. 6), or b) the speaker’s wish to highlight information as noteworthy (see also Baumann & Hadelich, 2003). Another idea is that speakers may use prominent forms when the addressee’s attention is not already on the referent, because more explicit bottom-up input is needed to facilitate processing (Rosa, Finch, Bergeson, & Arnold, 2013, this volume).…”