Disambiguating Literal and Idiomatic Interpretations

In this talk I presented preliminary results of a production experiment I conducted with the help of 13 native speakers of Spanish. Using a modified Discourse Completion Task to provide background information, participants produced a set of 20 minimally different pairs of sentences where the key difference was the interpretation the participants had in mind at the time of production.

This production experiment provided the backbones for the fist chapter of my dissertation. The key findings were that participants produced statistically significant shorter sentences with narrower F0 ranges when their intent was idiomatic.