2007 Presentations (Communicative Events)

On the Role of Context and Prosody in the Interpretation of ‘Okay’

Hirschberg, Julia Bell; Gravano, Agustin; Benus, Stefan; Chavez, Hector; Wilcox, Lauren

We examine the effect of contextual and acoustic cues in the disambiguation of three discourse-pragmatic functions of the word okay. Results of a perception study show that contextual cues are stronger predictors of discourse function than acoustic cues. However, acoustic features capturing the pitch excursion at the right edge of okay feature prominently in disambiguation, whether other contextual cues are present or not.