Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research has shown that pragmatic, social, and prosodic cues are used to infer the communicative intent of a speaker,including pedagogical intentions (Bohn & Frank, 2020; Cristia, 2013; Csibra & Gergely, 2009). However, little is knownabout whether prosodic features can signal pedagogical intent in syntactically equivalent utterances. We asked whetherprosodic features can carry information about the intent of a question (i.e., whether it is a pedagogical or an informationseeking question), both within child- and adult-directed speech. Eighty naive participants were asked to classify questionsgenerated by five different speakers. We found that participants could reliably discriminate between questions intendedto be pedagogical from those that were intended to be information seeking, both within child- and adult-directed speech,although pedagogical questions were detected more successfully when spoken with child-directed speech. These findingsindicate that prosody may convey pedagogical intent, which in turn may facilitate learning.