INVESTIGADORES
GRAVANO Agustin
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
The effect of contour type and epistemic modality on the assessment of speaker certainty
Autor/es:
AGUSTÍN GRAVANO; STEFAN BENUS; JULIA HIRSCHBERG; ELISA SNEED GERMAN; GREGORY WARD
Lugar:
Campinas
Reunión:
Congreso; 4th International Conference on Speech Prosody (SP2008); 2008
Institución organizadora:
International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
Resumen:
In an empirical study participants were asked to rate the perceived degree of certainty of utterances that contained either the modal ´would´ or main verb ´be´ (e.g. "That would be me" vs. "That´s me"), and which were also variously produced with one of three intonational contours (downstepped, declarative, and yes-no question). We found that both downstepped contour and epistemic ´would´ made a significant and independent contribution to the assessment of speaker certainty. That is, participants rated utterances with the downstepped contour as most certain, followed by those with the declarative contour, while the yes-no question contour was perceived as highly uncertain. Similarly, participants rated speakers´ responses with epistemic ´would´ as significantly more certain than those without it.
