Constantijn Kaland Prosodic marking of semantic contrasts : Do speakers adapt to addressees ? Prosodic marking of semantic contrasts : do speakers adapt to addressees ? describes a series of psycholinguistic experiments on the extent to which speakers adapt to addressees by using contrastive intonation . Four studies have been carried out to investigate prosodic adaptation processes of different kinds . Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 report studies on the extent to which speakers , in the way they prosodically mark semantic contrasts , account for the knowledge state of their addressees . Chapter 4 and 5 report studies on the extent to which paralinguistic prosodic adaptation processes between interlocutors affect the prosodic marking of semantic contrasts . The experimental approach throughout the thesis consists of eliciting speech recordings which are analyzed by production and perception measures . Taking all studies in this thesis together , we can conclude that the way speakers mark information structure prosodically , by means of contrastive intonation , is highly determined by the interaction with the interlocutor . That is , speakers adapt their prosody depending on their assumptions about the knowledge state of the addressee as well as their own ( Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 ) . Furthermore , we find a relation between prosodic adaptation and the extent to which prosody is used in a functional way . In particular , the degree of perceived ( Chapter 4 ) or produced ( Chapter 5 ) adaptation depends on the extent to which prosody contributes to the linguistic meaning of utterances .
