Abstract
Cue words in dialogue have different interpretations depending context and prosody. This paper presents a corpus study and perception experiment investigating when prosody causes right and really to be perceived as questioning or expressing surprise. Pitch range is found to be the best cue for surprise. This extends to the question rating for really but not for right . In fact, prosody appears to interact with semantics so ratings differ for these two types of cue word even when prosodic features are similar. So, different semantics appears to result in different surprise/question rating thresholds.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | INTERSPEECH 2009, 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Brighton, United Kingdom, September 6-10, 2009 |
| Pages | 1963-1966 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |