The current study assessed the extent to which the use of referential prosody varies with communicative demand. Speaker–listener dyads completed a referential communication task during which speakers attempted to indicate one of two color swatches (one bright, one dark) to listeners. Speakers' bright sentences were reliably higher pitched than dark sentences for ambiguous (e.g., bright red versus dark red) but not unambiguous (e.g., bright red versus dark purple) trials, suggesting that speakers produced meaningful acoustic cues to brightness when the accompanying (...) linguistic content was underspecified (e.g., “Can you get the red one?”). Listening partners reliably chose the correct corresponding swatch for ambiguous trials when lexical information was insufficient to identify the target, suggesting that listeners recruited prosody to resolve lexical ambiguity. Prosody can thus be conceptualized as a type of vocal gesture that can be recruited to resolve referential ambiguity when there is communicative demand to do so. (shrink)

This investigation examined whether speakers produce reliable prosodic correlates to meaning across semantic domains and whether listeners use these cues to derive word meaning from novel words. Speakers were asked to produce phrases in infant‐directed speech in which novel words were used to convey one of two meanings from a set of antonym pairs (e.g., big/small). Acoustic analyses revealed that some acoustic features were correlated with overall valence of the meaning. However, each word meaning also displayed a unique acoustic signature, (...) and semantically related meanings elicited similar acoustic profiles. In two perceptual tests, listeners either attempted to identify the novel words with a matching meaning dimension (picture pair) or with mismatched meaning dimensions. Listeners inferred the meaning of the novel words significantly more often when prosody matched the word meaning choices than when prosody mismatched. These findings suggest that speech contains reliable prosodic markers to word meaning and that listeners use these prosodic cues to differentiate meanings. That prosody is semantic suggests a reconceptualization of traditional distinctions between linguistic and nonlinguistic properties of spoken language. (shrink)

There is remarkable variety in emotional life. Not all mental states referred to by the same word (e.g., “fear”) look alike, feel alike, or have the same neurophysiological signature. Variability has been observed within individuals over time, across individuals from the same culture, and of course across cultures. In this paper, I outline an approach to understanding the richness and diversity of emotional life. This model, called the conceptual act model, is not only well suited to explaining individual differences in (...) the frequency and quality of emotion, but it also suggests the counter-intuitive view that the variety in emotional life extends past the boundaries of events that are conventionally called “emotion” to other classes of psychological events that people call by different names, such as “cognitions”. As a result, the conceptual act model is a unifying account of the broad variety of mental states that constitute the human mind. (shrink)