Understandable Misstatements Lead to Gentle Corrections: Prosodic Realization of Epistemic Gaps

Research has shown that corrective information is produced with higher prosodic prominence than non-corrective information. However, it remains unclear how corrective prosody is realized in different communicative settings. We conducted two production experiments to investigate whether interlocutors’ prosodic realization of corrective focus depends on each other’s knowledge state. Participants carried out a statement-response task in pairs (e.g. Speaker A: “Tina had shrimp at a restaurant.” Speaker B: “No, she had beef at a restaurant.”). We manipulated whether Speaker A’s statement was implausible in the context (e.g. Tina in fact hates seafood). Furthermore, the two experiments differed in whether Speaker A knew the probability of his or her statement. In Exp.1, both speakers had access to the crucial context concerning the probability of Speaker A’s statement (e.g. Tina’s preferences about food). In Exp.2, only Speaker B had access to this background information. Mixed-effects models were fit on the f0 ranges of target words in Speaker B’s responses (e.g. “beef”). We found that Speaker B’s prosody was influenced by both (i) the contextual probability of Speaker A’s statements and (ii) Speaker A’s knowledge (or lack thereof) about the contextual probability. We present an analysis where the prosodic prominence associated with corrective information reflects the gap between expectation and reality – in this case, what Speaker B had expected Speaker A to know and what Speaker A appeared to know.