No abstract

Five studies explored the processing of ambiguous sentences like Martin maintained that the CEO lied when the investigation started/at the start of the investigation. The central question was why particular prosodic boundaries have the effects they do. A written questionnaire provided baseline preferences and suggested that clausal adjuncts (when the investigation started) receive more high attachments than nonclausal adjuncts (at the start of the investigation). Four auditory studies manipulated the prosodic boundary before the adjunct clause and the prosodic boundary between the matrix clause and its complement. They disconfirm every version of an account where only the local boundary before the adjunct is important, whether the account is based on the acoustic magnitude of the boundary or its phonological type (an intermediate boundary characterized by the presence of a phrase accent vs. an intonational phrase boundary characterized by both a phrase accent and a boundary tone). Instead the results support use of the global prosodic context, especially the relative size of the local boundary and the distant boundary.

In principle, a prosodic boundary in an utterance might affect its interpretation in a local, context-independent fashion. In a right-branching language like English, the presence of a large prosodic boundary might signal the end of the current constituent, requiring the following constituent to be attached high in the syntactic tree. We present three listening experiments that test an alternative position suggested in Carlson, Clifton, and Frazier (2001) as the "informative boundary" hypothesis. This hypothesis claims that the interpretation of a prosodic boundary is determined not by its absolute size but by its size relative to relevant certain other boundaries. Experiment 1 confirmed the predictions of this hypothesis in phrases like the old men and women with very large houses, manipulating the boundaries before and and with. Experiment 2 investigated the effect in a variety of diverse syntactic structures, varying syntactic category and status (head vs. nonhead) of the ambiguous constituent. It confirmed the predictions of the informative boundary hypothesis in every structure tested except for '-ly' adverbs that are ambiguous between a manner interpretation and a speaker-evaluation interpretation. Experiment 3 demonstrated that sentence interpretation was affected by the size of the late boundary relative to a relevant early boundary, but not relative to an early boundary that was predicted to be irrelevant.

Two studies explored the processing of ambiguous sentences like Bill took chips to the party and Susan to the game, which may be assigned a gapping (Susan took chips) or a nongapping structure (Bill took Susan). The central question was what factors affect the ultimate interpretive preferences for these sentences. In a written questionnaire, sentences with greater parallelism between arguments in the positions of Bill and Susan received more gapping responses, though an overall bias toward the nongapping structure was seen. An auditory comprehension study showed that prosodic parallels between arguments also affected interpretation. In both experiments parallelism played a significant role in determining an interpretation, but the simpler structure, the nongapping structure, was preferred overall.

In English, new information typically appears late in the sentence, as does primary accent. Because of this tendency, perceivers might expect the final constituent or constituents of a sentence to contain informational focus. This expectation should in turn affect how they comprehend focus-sensitive constructions such as ellipsis sentences. Results from four experiments on sluicing sentences (e.g., The mobster implicated the thug, but we can't find out who else) suggest that perceivers do prefer to place focus late in the sentence, though that preference can be mitigated by prosodic information (pitch accents, Experiment 2) or syntactic information (clefted sentences, Experiment 3) indicating that focus is located elsewhere. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the direct object, but the informationally focused constituent that is the preferred antecedent (Experiment 4). Expectations regarding the information structure of a sentence, which are only partly cancellable by means of overt focus markers, may explain persistent biases in ellipsis resolution.