Investigating the Role of Prosody in Disambiguating Implicit Discourse Relations in Egyptian Arabic

We investigate whether prosody can help to disambiguate discourse relations. To address this question, we conducted a controlled experiment examining the impact of prosody in the absence of context, which is crucial for disambiguation. The aim was to determine whether specific prosodic features correlate with the disambiguation of implicit discourse relations. The dataset used in the experiment consisted of 22 pairs of examples, recorded by 21 native speakers of Egyptian Arabic. These examples are two-part sentences with an implicit discourse relation that can be ambiguously read as either causal or concessive, paired with two different preceding context sentences forcing either the causal or the concessive reading. We use linear mixed-effects models to analyze the impact of causal versus concessive discourse relations on prosodic features. We find that, relative to the causal relation, the concessive relation was produced with a longer pause duration between discourse segments, a wider F0 interquartile range for the second segment, and a lower last F0 max for the first segment. These differences are statistically significant, suggesting that speakers use prosody to distinguish between causal and concessive relations.