Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Intonation plays an integral role in comprehending spoken lan-guage. It encodes post-lexical pragmatic functions such as sen-tence modality and discourse contexts. The present experimentinvestigates how and when listeners integrate intonational in-formation to anticipate reference resolution. While most workon the real-time processes of intonation-based intention recog-nition has utilized eye tracking, the present study uses themouse tracking paradigm, a valuable complementary methodto investigate the time course of speech processing. Partici-pants had to choose an interpretation based on pre-recorded in-structions containing different intonation contours. Recordingsof the x,y coordinates of participants’ computer mouse move-ments reveal that listeners integrate intonational informationrapidly as soon as they become available and anticipate poten-tial referential interpretations early on.