The effects of prosodic focus on the interpretation of short exchanges

People often produce ambiguous and indirect answers such as “The food was great” in response to “How was your trip?” This study examines how prosodic focus contributes to the interpretation of these sentences. Across two experiments, we investigate the influence of prosodic focus on how listeners interpret indirect responses. In Experiment 1, participants heard semantically ambiguous question-answer pairs where prosodic focus was placed on either an adjective or a noun. Experiment 2 introduced explicit affirmative or negative interjections to assess the influence of prosodic focus when additional disambiguating cues were present. Prosodic focus systematically shaped interpretation, even when explicit lexical markers were available, affecting which elements of the sentence listeners prioritized in their responses. Exploratory cluster analyses revealed individual differences, with some participants relying on lexical semantics and others weighting prosodic cues more strongly. These findings support interactive models of speech comprehension, highlighting the role of prosody in shaping meaning.