ABSTRACT

Real-time speech comprehension is challenging because communicatively relevant information is distributed throughout the entire utterance. In five mouse tracking experiments on German and American English, we probe if listeners, in principle, use non-local, early intonational information to anticipate upcoming referents. Listeners had to select a speaker-intended referent with their mouse guided by intonational cues, allowing them to anticipate their decision by moving their hand toward the referent prior to lexical disambiguation. While German listeners (Exps. 1–3) seemed to ignore early pitch cues, American English listeners (Exps. 4–5) were in principle able to use these early pitch cues to anticipate upcoming referents. However, many listeners showed no indication of doing so. These results suggest that there are important positional asymmetries in the way intonational information is integrated, with early information being paid less attention to than later cues in the utterance. Open data, scripts, and materials can be retrieved here: https://osf.io/xf8be/.

摘要

实时语音理解具有挑战性，因为与交流相关的信息分布在整个话语中。在针对德语和美式英语的五个鼠标跟踪实验中，我们从原则上探讨了听众是否使用非本地，早期国际化信息来预测即将到来的对象。听众不得不选择带有说话者意图的对象，并以国际化的提示引导他们的鼠标，从而使他们能够在词汇歧义消除之前将手移向该对象，从而预测自己的决定。尽管德国的听众（实验1-3）似乎忽略了早期的音调提示，但美国英语的听众（实验的4-5）在原则上能够使用这些早期的音调提示来预测即将到来的对象。但是，许多听众没有表明这样做的迹象。这些结果表明，在整合国家信息的过程中存在重要的位置不对称性，早期话语的注意要比后期话语的注意要少。可以在以下位置检索开放数据，脚本和资料：https://osf.io/xf8be/。