The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation

Abstract

Prosodic structure and syntactic structure are not identical; neither are they unrelated. Knowing when and how the two correspond could yield better quality speech synthesis, could aid in the disambiguation of competing syntactic hypotheses in speech understanding, and could lead to a more comprehensive view of human speech processing. In a set of experiments involving 35 pairs of phonetically similar sentences representing seven types of structural contrasts, the perceptual evidence shows that some, but not all, of the pairs can be disambiguated on the basis of prosodic differences. The phonological evidence relates the disambiguation primarily to boundary phenomena, although prominences sometimes play a role. Finally, phonetic analyses describing the attributes of these phonological markers indicate the importance of both absolute and relative measures.

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

“…For example, Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Fong (1991) had speakers produce ambiguous sentences like those in (2) following a disambiguating context, and showed that speakers consistently place boundaries in different places depending on the intended meaning.…”

“…Primarily, speakers mark boundaries with increased duration of pre-boundary words (Price, et al, 1991;Wightman, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Ostendorf, & Price, 1992;Ferreira, 1993;Lehiste, Olive & Streeter, 1976;Selkirk, 1984;Schafer, et al, 2000;Snedeker & Trueswell, 2003) and / or silence (Lehiste, 1973;Klatt, 1975;Cooper & Paccia-Copper, 1980). In addition, speakers often raise or lower their pitch at the end of intonational phrases (Streeter, 1978;Pierrehumbert, 1980).…”

FMRI reveals brain regions mediating slow prosodic modulations in spoken sentences

“…Evidence from a recent ERP study indicates that intonational boundaries are immediately decoded and used to guide the listener's initial decisions about a sentence's syntactic structure [Steinhauer et al, 1999;Steinhauer and Friederici, 2001]. Many studies have shown that attention to prosodic cues (i.e., F 0 and duration) can help listeners to distinguish between potentially ambiguous sentences, e.g., old (men and women) vs. (old men) and women [Baum and Pell, 1999;Price et al, 1991]. The types of slow F 0 movements that occur at phrasal boundaries can also give listeners some semantic information about the sentences they are listening to.…”

The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production

“…At the same time, prosody can signal a sentence's syntactic structure, evidenced by listeners' use of prosody to determine the intended interpretation of syntactically ambigous sentences (e.g. Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Warren, Grenier, & Lee, 1992;Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Fong, 1991;Schafer, 1997;Snedecker & Trueswell, 2003;Speer, Kjelgaard, & Dobroth, 1996).…”