Marking prosodic prominence for voice assistant and human addressees.
Eleonora J. Beier, Michelle Cohn, Timothy Trammel, Fernanda Ferreira, Georgia Zellou · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · 2024
when addressing an interlocutor that is consistently rated as having less communicative ability. Stimuli consisted of question-answer pairs, where California English speakers read identical sentences (e.g., "Jude saw the sun") in response to interlocutors' questions probing different foci (e.g., "Who saw the sun?"). Experiment 1 reveals consistent acoustic adjustments to mark focus on either the subject or the object of a sentence. In Experiment 2, we find that listeners reliably infer the intended information structure based on these acoustic adjustments. Across both experiments, we see no consistent difference in focus marking by type of interlocutor (human vs. voice assistant). Nonetheless, listeners associate particular features (slower speech rate) with speech directed at voice assistants. Taken together, our findings suggest that while speakers apply communicative strategies from human-human interaction when addressing voice assistants, listeners expect a device-specific register. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).