Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Ambiguity pervades language. One prevalent kind ofambiguity is indirect requests. For example, “My office isreally hot” could be intended not only as a complaint aboutthe temperature, but as a request to turn on the AC. How docomprehenders determine whether a speaker is making arequest? We ask whether the prosody of an utterance providesinformation about a speaker’s intentions. In a behavioralexperiment, we find that human listeners can identify whichof two utterances a speaker intended as a request, suggestingthat speakers can produce discriminable cues. We then showthat the acoustic features associated with an utterance allow aclassifier to detect the original intent of an utterance (74%accuracy). Finally, we ask which of these features predictlistener accuracy on the behavioral experiment.