Intonation contours reliably convey meaning intended by the talker
(Ladd, 2008). Acoustic realizations of intonation contours are
notoriously variable, however (Arvaniti, 2019). Contours treated by
speakers and listeners as instances of the “same” tune can differ
substantially from each other, both for systematic factors such as
talkers (e.g., age, gender, dialect) and speaking conditions, as well as
for random factors (Clopper & Smiljanic, 2011). Currently, little is
known about how listeners can resolve the uncertainty resulting from the
variable acoustic input. The current study examines /talker variability/
associated with two utterance types – rising (e.g., /It’s raining?/) vs.
falling (e.g., /It’s raining/) declaratives. These are well established
intonational phenomena (Gunlogson, 2008; Jeong & Potts, 2016), often
considered to be perceptually separable from one another. We first ask
how and how much talkers differ from one another and how listeners may
be able to overcome the talker-variability. We then adopt Ideal Observer
analyses (Kleinschmidt, 2019) to test whether the structure of the
variability can /in principle/ afford listeners the means to navigate
the variability in intonation processing.