Tracking who knows what: epistemic gaps and the prosodic realization of corrective focus

Abstract

Abstract 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 B: Tina had shrimp at a restaurant. Speaker A: No, she had beef at a restaurant.). Our focus is on the prosody of Speaker A’s utterance. We manipulated whether Speaker B’s statement was implausible in the context (e.g., a context where it is known that Tina actually hates seafood). Furthermore, the two experiments differed in whether Speaker B knew that their statement (e.g., about Tina eating shrimp at a restaurant) was (im)plausible. In Experiment 1, both speakers had access to the crucial context concerning the probability of Speaker A’s statement (Tina’s preferences about food). In Experiment 2, only Speaker A had access to this background information. We found that Speaker A’s prosody when responding to Speaker B was influenced by both (i) the contextual probability of Speaker B’s statements and (ii) Speaker B’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 A had expected Speaker B to say and what Speaker B actually says.