Perceiving Surprise on Cue Words: Prosody and Semantics Interact on Right and Really

摘要

Cue words in dialogue have different interpretations dependingcontext and prosody. This paper presents a corpus study andperception experiment investigating when prosody causes rightand really to be perceived as questioning or expressing surprise.Pitch range is found to be the best cue for surprise. This ex-tends to the question rating for really but not for right. In fact,prosody appears to interact with semantics so ratings differ forthese two types of cue word even when prosodic features aresimilar. So, different semantics appears to result in differentsurprise/question rating thresholds.