Does Prosody Support or Direct Sentence Processing?

Abstract

for their help in various other aspects of the studies. Paul Warren, Don Mitchell and an anonymous reviewer provided very helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.This paper addresses the question of the way in which prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. Two studies were run. The rst, based on Beach (1991), dealt with people's judgements of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing prosodic contours. In the rst, an effect of prosody was found over short but not over longer sentence fragments; in the second, some evidence was found of a prosodic effect in the judgement of normality. The behavioural data are related to acoustic analyses of the experimental materials. The implications of these studies for current sentence processing models are discussed.

Neural substrates of linguistic prosody: Evidence from syntactic disambiguation in the productions of brain-damaged patients

“…These results suggest either that normal speakers do not utilize F0 in a consistent manner to mark the type of syntactic boundaries examined in the present study (Albritton et al, 1996;Stirling & Wales, 1996;Walker et al, 2004) or that the specific measures used do not adequately reflect the actual distinguishing features produced (e.g., Baum et al, 2001; but cf. Blasko & Hall, 1998;Ladd, 1988;Price et al, 1991;Warren, 1985) 4 .…”

“…In a further investigation of prosodic cues to disambiguation, Baum et al (2001) explored three syntactically ambiguous sentence types: adjectival scope ambiguities (Lehiste, 1973), prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities (Lehiste et al, 1976) and noun phrase attachment ambiguities (Beach, 1988;1991;Shapiro & Nagel, 1995;Stirling & Wales, 1996;Warren, 1985). As in the previous study, acoustic analyses suggested relatively spared abilities to signal the syntactic constituent structure using temporal cues in both LHD and RHD participants.…”

Influence of Prosodic Information on the Processing of Split Particles: ERP Evidence from Spoken German

“…However, caution is at order before drawing firm conclusions regarding the exact role of prosody on syntactic parsing. Contradictory findings challenging the view that prosody can immediately influence parsing decisions have also been reported (Pynte & Prieur 1996;Stirling & Wales, 1996;Watt & Murray, 1996). But, as suggested by Steinhauer and Friederici (2001, p. 270), apart from the complex interplay of acoustic parameters, one important reason for the mixed data, and a major drawback in this field, was the much regretted lack of an appropriate on-line method.…”

Human Communication Investigated With Magnetoencephalography: Speech, Music, and Gestures

“…In particular, the boundaries between phrases are marked by pauses, lengthening of the last syllable prior to the boundary and changes (resetting) in the F0 contour. Apart from evidence from behavioral research (Stirling and Wales, 1996;Warren et al, 1995), neuropsychological correlates for the perception and processing of prosodic phrase boundaries by the human brain have also been reported (Steinhauer, 2003;Steinhauer et al, 1999). It was found that each phrase boundary was marked by a positive shift in the ERP of a few hundred milliseconds duration and a centro-parietal scalp distribution.…”