Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure

Nakamura, Chie; Arai, M.; Mazuka, Reiko

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.016

Cited by 38 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…These predictions can be based on real-world knowledge (Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003a;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha et al, 2003Wicha et al, , 2004, syntactic information such as gender, case, or preceding syntactic structure (Dahan, Swingley, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2000;Dickey et al, 2007;Dickey & Thompson, 2009;Kamide, Scheepers, & Altmann, 2003b;Lau et al, 2006;Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010;Sussman & Sedivy, 2003), properties of the verb (Boland, 2005;Kamide et al, 2003a;), or prosody (Nakamura, Arai, & Mazuka, 2012;Weber, Grice, & Crocker, 2006). Whereas most native speakers appear to use information rapidly to anticipate upcoming information, studies on second-language (L2) learners suggest that non-native speakers do not anticipate to the same extent as native speakers, even though they know the specific rules and words used when probed off-line (Dussias, Valdés Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo & Gerfen, 2013;Grüter, Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2012;Grüter & Rohde, 2013;Hopp, 2013;Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010;Martin et al, 2013).…”

Section: Predictive Processing In Native and Non-native Sentence Procmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predictive sentence processing in L2 and L1

Kaan

2014

LAB

201

133

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There is ample evidence that native speakers anticipate upcoming information at various levels during sentence comprehension. In contrast, some studies on late second-language (L2) learners support the view that L2 learners do not anticipate information during processing, or at least, not to the same extent as native speakers do. In the current paper, I propose that native and L2 speakers are underlyingly the same as far as sentence processing mechanisms are concerned, and that potential differences in anticipatory behavior can be accounted for by the same factors that drive individual differences in native speakers; in particular, differences in frequency biases, competing information, the accuracy and consistency of the lexical representation, and task-induced effects. Suggestions for future research are provided.

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Section: Predictive Processing In Native and Non-native Sentence Procmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predictive sentence processing in L2 and L1

Kaan

2014

LAB

201

133

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“…Previous eye-tracking studies have shown that emphatic pitch prominence immediately evokes a contrast and leads to anticipatory eye movements in the presence of a visual target that substantiates the contrastive inter pretation (Dahan, Chambers, & Tanenhaus, 2002;Ito & Speer, 2008;Ito, Jincho, Minai, Yamane, & Mazuka, 2012;Ito, Bybik, Wagner, & Speer, in press;Nakamura, Arai, & Mazuka, 2012;Weber et al, 2006). For example, when participants followed sequential instructions for a holiday tree decoration task in Ito and Speer (2008), the prominence on GREEN in a sequence such as 'Hang a blue ball' -> ■ 'To its right, hang a GREEN drum' sent their eyes to the balls before they identified the correct ornament (drum).…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Also, the absence of visual contrast may prevent the contrastive interpretation of the pitch expansion, if referential availability constrains the use of prosody. A recent study by Nakamura et al (2012) showed that a pitch range reset at the beginning of an RC in Japanese could evoke contrastive interpretation, but only when the referential context elicited a contrast. Likewise, the phrase-medial pitch expansion may be processed only as a structural cue when the visual context precludes the contrastive interpretation of pitch prominence.…”

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confidence: 97%

The interpretation of phrase-medial prosodic prominence in Japanese: is it sensitive to visual and discourse context?

Ito

Arai

Hirose

2013

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Due to the language-specific prosodic architecture, a phrase-medial pitch expansion in Japanese may signal either a narrow contrast or the beginning of a new syntactic phrase. To examine how visual and discourse context affects the tug of war between these two interpretations, three eye-tracking experiments tested the interpretation of a pitch expansion in referential contexts that varied in the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. The results showed that the degree of structural interpretation was inversely related to the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. Although there was no direct evidence of contrastive processing of the pitch prominence, participants responded to the trials with the pitch expansion much slower than to those without the expansion only when the contrastive interpretation of the pitch prominence was contextually infelicitous. These results suggest that the phrase-medial pitch expansion may have been simultaneously processed for contrast and structural disambiguation. However, the task that demanded resolutions of standing referential ambiguities seemed to make the structural disambiguation the best use of the prosodic cue.

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“…Thus, any impact on syntactic analysis by these acoustic properties is a reflection of underlying acoustic contributions to sentence processing. Several previous investigations have used varying productions of the same sentence to compare different prosodic conditions (e.g., Kjelgaard and Speer, 1999;Nakamura et al, 2012). Such methods rely on the talker being able to directly control a single acoustic parameter during production.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dynamic F0 cues have been demonstrated to aid in sentence recognition of low-predictable declarative sentences, as flattening the pitch contour reduces sentence intelligibility (e.g., Laures and Weismer, 2003). Analysis of eye tracking data suggests that listeners use disambiguating intonational cues to form a syntactic prediction prior to hearing the disambiguating information in the sentence (Nakamura et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%