Linguistic rhythm guides parsing decisions in written sentence comprehension

Kentner, Gerrit

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.11.012

Cited by 66 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…For reading English sentences, Fodor (1998) argues for a "same-size-sister constraint" in the parsing of ambiguous sentences. For other evidence to this point, see Breen and Clifton (2011) for the role of English word stress in silent reading, or Kentner (2012) on the resolution of syntactic ambiguities through preferred rhythmic (alternating) structures, in reading aloud German sentences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic parallelism explaining morphophonological variation in German

Wiese

Speyer

2015

Linguistics

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Words in German show several instances of a seemingly optional schwa-zero alternation, both in relation with inflected forms as well as in the final position of stems and simplex words, as in des Tag(e)s 'the day, gen. sg.', or gern(e) 'gladly'. The present paper proposes that the (non-)appearance of schwa is partially governed by a hitherto unknown prosodic parallelism: the schwacontaining form (a branching trochaic foot) is preferred whenever a neighboring word is of the same trochaic shape; and vice versa: the schwa-less form is found adjacent to another monosyllabic form. In other words, adjacent feet are required to have identical structure, binary branching (bisyllabic) or non-branching (monosyllabic).Large-scale corpora are used as the main source of evidence for the verification or falsification of the hypothesis. A diverse set of nouns and adverbs involving schwa-zero alternations were studied in appropriate phrasal contexts, both from present-day Standard German and from Early New High German. Based on comprehensive corpus counts, these phrases are tested for the hypothesis of prosodic parallelism. A series of chi square tests and a generalized linear model with mixed effects demonstrate statistically that the prosodic shapes of the target word and its adjacent form are not independent of each other. The focus of the paper is on empirical evidence for Prosodic Parallelism as a new type of prosodic constraint. The relevance of this constraint for the persistence of variation over a long period of time is discussed as well.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic parallelism explaining morphophonological variation in German

Wiese

Speyer

2015

Linguistics

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“…From a theoretical perspective this is interesting, because it suggests that phonological information is available for syntax at an early level of processing; a finding that has independently been established by Kentner (2012).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

10 Function words in rhythmic optimisation

Vogel¹,

Vijver²,

Kotz³

et al. 2015

Rhythm in Cognition and Grammar

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“…The difference is that while Breen and Clifton's research involved the reassignment of lexical stress, the Bader results involves the reassignment of a focus-expressing pitch accent. Similarly, Kentner (2012;described in Breen, this volume) has provided evidence indicating that readers avoided having two implicitly stressed syllables adjacent to each other by changing whether or not a function word was implicitly accented. The presumed accent on the function word, in turn, affected how it was interpreted.…”

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confidence: 91%

The Roles of Phonology in Silent Reading: A Selective Review

CliftonJr.

2015

Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics

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This chapter presents a selective review of evidence about how phonological representations are involved in silent reading. Knowledge of the mapping of orthography onto phonology appears to be important in skilled reading, and this knowledge is applied very early in the process of recognizing words in isolation. The same is true when one is reading sentences and texts, and the creation of a phonological representation of a text appears to play a critical role in guiding the movement of the eyes during reading. Phonological representations beyond the level of the individual word, including prosodic representations, also seem to play an important role in guiding parsing and in integrating discourse.

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Linguistic rhythm guides parsing decisions in written sentence comprehension

Cited by 66 publications

References 36 publications

Prosodic parallelism explaining morphophonological variation in German

Prosodic parallelism explaining morphophonological variation in German

10 Function words in rhythmic optimisation

The Roles of Phonology in Silent Reading: A Selective Review

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