Informative Prosodic Boundaries

Abstract

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.

Is it all relative? Effects of prosodic boundaries on the comprehension and production of attachment ambiguities

“…Other theories focus on a more limited range of phenomena and characterize the mapping within this domain. One commonly explored phenomenon is the prosodic phrasing of syntactic attachment ambiguities (Schafer, 1997;Carlson et al, 2001;Clifton, Carlson & Frazier, 2002). There are several reasons why this might be a particularly productive place to begin pinning down the syntax-prosody interface.…”

“…More recently, however, other theorists have suggested that the boundary before the ambiguous phrase can only be interpreted in light of the global prosodic structure of the utterance (Schafer, 1997;Clifton et al 2002;Carlson et al, 2001). This claim is made most explicit in the work of Carlson, Clifton and Frazier who argue that the boundary at location B is always interpreted with respect to any other boundary that occurs before a constituent that contains the lower attachment site but not the higher attachment site (Clifton et al, 2002).…”

“…This claim is made most explicit in the work of Carlson, Clifton and Frazier who argue that the boundary at location B is always interpreted with respect to any other boundary that occurs before a constituent that contains the lower attachment site but not the higher attachment site (Clifton et al, 2002). In the utterance above the only boundary that would be relevant is the one marked A.…”

“…In comprehension studies when a boundary is added in location B, it is typically larger than any relevant boundary A and thus changes the interpretation of the utterance on both hypotheses. In a series of comprehension studies, Carlson and colleagues demonstrate that relative boundary size has an effect on interpretation (Clifton et al 2002;Carlson et al, 2001). But research to date has not explored whether the absolute size of the final boundary plays a role independent of relative boundary size, and the evidence that the relative boundary size plays a role independent of absolute boundary size is limited, coming from a single lab and paradigm (albeit from several constructions).…”

Disfluencies and human language comprehension

“…Conversation would be impossible if efficient mechanisms for dealing with uhs, ums, repeats and repairs were not a basic part of the architecture of the human comprehension system. There has been some work examining the influence of PROSODIC 'cues' on comprehension, but even in these approaches the goal is to evaluate the use of prosody during SYNTACTIC operations [4][5][6]. Moreover, studies of prosody have not considered utterances containing mistakes and misarticulations, even though they are part of the input the comprehension system routinely processes.…”