Implicit effects of regional cues on the interpretation of intonation by Corsican French listeners

It is now well documented for different varieties of English that the speech production and perception systems rapidly adapt to contextual social cues. This adaptation is sensitive not only to speaker social identity but also to implicit social cues, suggesting that the underlying mechanism is automatic rather than controlled. While it has recently been shown that the interpretation of intonation depends on segmental cues to sociolect within the same utterance, the present study explores whether it also depends on implicit contextual social cues. Starting from the observation that a specific type of intonational contour is used differently in Corsican French and Continental French, we tested whether Corsican French listeners interpret this contour differently depending on which dialectal region is evoked by a visual cue. The results are consistent with this hypothesis, thus providing evidence for implicit social adaption in a new domain of linguistic behavior, specifically, the prosody-meaning interface. We describe an exemplar-based model of our results demonstrating that such models can be readily extended to capture the effects found by the present study.