Prosody in speech as a source of referential information

<p>Although prosody has primarily been assumed to convey information regarding linguistic structure and speakers’ emotional state, increasing evidence suggests that prosody also conveys <i>referential</i> details. We examined the extent to which language users produce and infer information from prosodic correlates to perceptual details in the visual modality, specifically colour brightness. In Experiments 1 and 2, speakers labelled colours that varied in brightness with either familiar colour names (e.g. red; Exp. 1) or novel words (e.g. blicket; Exp. 2). Speakers used higher pitch, shorter duration, and higher amplitude for novel words, but not for familiar colour names, when labelling brighter versus darker shades. Listeners in Experiment 3 reliably inferred the intended target colour referent from the recorded utterances obtained in Experiment 2. Findings suggest that prosody reflects cross-modal correspondences between auditory and visual domains and, like a type of vocal gesture, provides an additional channel of information that resolves referential ambiguity.</p