15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Intonation and Discourse Processing

Jennifer J. Venditti, Julia Hirschberg

Columbia University, USA

This paper describes intonational cues to discourse structure, and the role that intonation plays in spoken discourse processing. We begin by discussing two main structures in discourse that one must consider when doing research on discourse processing: segmentation and information status. We then review a number of key studies from the phonetics literature which have investigated the intonational marking of these structures.
   Next, we discuss in detail the psycholinguistic research to date which has examined the role that intonation can play in facilitating or inhibiting the processing of discourse in English and other related languages. We conclude by outlining directions for future research in the area of intonation-discourse processing.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Venditti, Jennifer J. / Hirschberg, Julia (2003): "Intonation and discourse processing", In ICPhS-15, 107-114.