Chigusa Kurumada

University of Rochester | UR · Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Speech prosody, the melodic and rhythmic properties of a language, plays a critical role in our everyday communication. Researchers have identified unique patterns of prosody that segment words and phrases, highlight focal elements in a sentence, and convey holistic meanings and speech acts that interact with the information shared in context. The...

Speech prosody plays an important role in communication of meaning. The cognitive and computational mechanisms supporting this communication remain to be understood, however. Prosodic cues vary across talkers and speaking conditions, creating ambiguity in the sound-to-meaning mapping. We hypothesize that listeners ameliorate this ambiguity in part...

Speech prosody, the melodic and rhythmic properties of a language, plays a critical role in our everyday communication. Researchers have identified unique patterns of prosody that segment words and phrases, highlight focal elements in a sentence, and convey holistic meanings and speech acts that interact with the information shared in context. The...

Linguistic communication requires understanding of words in relation to their context. Among various aspects of context, one that has received relatively little attention until recently is the speakers themselves. We asked whether comprehenders’ online language comprehension is affected by the perceived reliability with which a speaker formulates p...

Three experiments investigated adult learners’ acquisition of a novel adjective. In English and other languages, meanings of some gradable adjectives are said to include an absolute standard of comparison (e.g., full means completely filled with content). However, actual usage is often imprecise, where a maximum absolute standard of comparison, str...

The markedness principle plays a central role in linguistic theory: marked grammatical categories (like plural) tend to receive more linguistic encoding (e.g., morphological marking), while unmarked categories (like singular) tend to receive less linguistic encoding. What precisely makes a grammatical category or meaning marked, however, remains un...

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to...

Speech prosody, the rhythm and intonation in particular, plays an important role in communication of meaning. Rising vs. falling intonation contours signaling the speaker’s indented communicative meanings (i.e., asking a question vs. making a statement) has been widely recognized as a primary example of such prosody. However, what appears to be a s...

Listeners can generate contextually situated interpretations of known adjectives even with novel nouns (Exp. 1), even with little prior knowledge of them (Exp. 2).

Communicating meaning is a primary goal of everyday language use. One significant puzzle in the study of linguistic comprehension is that the meaning communicated via language often goes beyond an aggregate of word meaning; comprehenders systematically derive pragmatic—as opposed to lexical or semantic—interpretations by leveraging their extralingu...

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to...

Although prosody clearly affects the interpretation of utterances, the mapping between prosodic representations and acoustic features is highly variable. Listeners may in part cope with this variability by adapting to distributions of acoustic features in the input. We examined whether listeners adapt to distributional changes using the constructio...

Listeners delay contrastive inferences in the context of a pragmatically unreliable speaker after a short exposure, even without top-down information

Can preschoolers make pragmatic inferences based on the intonation of an utterance? Previous work has found that young children appear to ignore intonational meanings and come to understand contrastive intonation contours only after age six. We show that four-year-olds succeed in interpreting an English utterance, such as "It LOOKS like a zebra", t...

According to Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quantity, rational talkers formulate their utterances to be as economical as possible while conveying all necessary information. Naturally produced referential expressions, however, often contain more or less information than what is predicted to be optimal given a rational speaker model. How do listeners cope w...

Grammatical encoding is one of the earliest stages in linguistic encoding. One broadly accepted view holds that grammatical encoding is primarily or exclusively affected by production ease, rather than communicative considerations. This contrasts with proposals that speakers' preferences during grammatical encoding reflect a trade-off between produ...

To navigate many-to-many mappings between referents and linguistic expressions, listeners need to calibrate likelihood estimates for different referential expressions taking into account both the context and speaker-specific variation. Focusing on speaker variation, we present three experiments. Experiment 1 establishes that listeners generalize sp...

Listeners face multiple challenges in mapping prosody onto intentions: The relevant intentions vary with the general context of an utterance (e.g., the speaker’s goals) and how prosodic contours are realized varies across speakers, accents, and speech conditions. We propose that listeners map acoustic information onto prosodic representations using...

Word frequencies in natural language follow a highly skewed Zipfian distribution, but the consequences of this distribution for language acquisition are only beginning to be understood. Typically, learning experiments that are meant to simulate language acquisition use uniform word frequency distributions. We examine the effects of Zipfian distribu...

Drawing on insights from recent work on phonetic adaptation, we examined how listeners interpret prosodic cues to two op-posing pragmatic meanings of the phrase "It looks like an X" (e.g., "It looks like a zebra (and it is one)" and "It LOOKS like a zebra (but its actually not)". After establishing that differ-ent prosodic contours map onto these m...

Word frequencies in natural language follow a Zipfian dis-tribution. Artificial language experiments that are meant to simulate language acquisition generally use uniform word fre-quency distributions, however. In the present study we exam-ine whether a Zipfian frequency distribution influences adult learners' word segmentation performance. Using t...

This is the version presented at Cambridge University World Oral Literature Project October 4th，2010. There is an audio file of the talk and the QA session at: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/226634

In cases of allophonic variation, the frequency of a variant has been claimed to influence phonological representations, affecting the perception and recognition of words. For example, Connine (2004) found stronger Ganong effects in words with frequent variants (e.g., intervocalic tap in the word pretty) than in words with infrequent variants (e.g....

The object of this presentation is to introduce a prototype of the Digital Museum Project in our attempt at the documentation of Ikema, one of the endangered dialects of Southern Ryukyuan, spoken on Miyakojima Island, Okinawa, Japan. The language is no longer acquired by younger people, and is spoken fluently only by people in their 60's or older....

Lexical dependencies abound in natural language. Words tend to follow particular words or word categories. Artificial language experiments exploring word segmentation generally lack such structure, however. In the present study, we explore whether simple inter-word dependencies influence the word segmentation performance of both adult learners and...