Prosodic cues signal the intent of potential indirect requests

Sean Trott, Stefanie Reed, Victor Ferreira, Benjamin Bergen

Abstract: Ambiguity pervades language. One prevalent kind of ambiguity is indirect requests. For example, “My office is really hot” could be intended not only as a complaint about the temperature, but as a request to turn on the AC. How do comprehenders determine whether a speaker is making a request? We ask whether the prosody of an utterance provides information about a speaker’s intentions. In a behavioral experiment, we find that human listeners can identify which of two utterances a speaker intended as a request, suggesting that speakers can produce discriminable cues. We then show that the acoustic features associated with an utterance allow a classifier to detect the original intent of an utterance (74% accuracy). Finally, we ask which of these features predict listener accuracy on the behavioral experiment.