Using Interactive Tasks to Elicit Natural Dialogue

Basic research into the relationship between intonation and speaker’s intentions about syntax and information structure addresses whether, when, and how speakers use prosodic information to signal linguistic and paralinguistic meaning. Speakers use prosody for a range of functions in communication: to mark the difference between immediately relevant vs. background information; to express contrast, contradiction, and correction; and to indicate the intended syntax of ambiguous utterances. In this paper, we review the methodologies used to examine intonation and sentence and discourse structure in language production studies. We focus on design conflicts that arise when experimental techniques need to generate a sufficient number of items for analysis, while simultaneously eliciting utterances that are representative of natural, conversational speech. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages inherent in (1) using spontaneous speech vs. various textbased elicitation techniques, (2) the effect of different levels of detail in instructions to speakers, and (3) the effects of manipulating the experimental environment. In the final sections, we present details of the method used in our own ‘tree decoration project’ as well as some preliminary cross-linguistic speech production data. These data include evidence for regularities in the realization of pitch accent placement and type in English discourse structure, and phonetic evidence for the intonational marking of discourse information status for accented and unaccented lexical items in Japanese.