Abstract
This paper examines the question of whether there are effects of prosody on the syntactic parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences containing complement verbs. It reports the results of five experiments employing cross-modal response tasks where the visually presented target word was either an ‘appropriate’ or an ‘inappropriate’ continuation in terms of the prosodic form of the preceeding auditory sentence fragment. Two experiments employing cross-modal naming only showed indications of sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness manipulations when coupled with a simultaneous appropriateness judgment task. In contrast, the experiments employing cross-modal lexical decision showed greater sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness effects. However, while the results from these studies replicated our earlier auditory parsing results and provided support for the suggestion that there are differences in visual and auditory parsing processes and for a ‘constituent-based,’ ‘minimal commitment’ type auditory parser, none of the studies demonstrated an effect of prosodic form on the parsing process.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balota, D., & Chumbley, J. (1984). Are lexical decisions a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 340–357.
Beach, C. M. (1988). The influence of higher level linguistic information on production of duration and pitch patterns at syntactic boundaries. Paper presented toAcoustical Society, November, 1988.
Cutler, A., & Isard, S. (1980). The production of prosody. In B. Butterworth (Ed.),Language Production: Vol 1. Speech and talk, (pp. 245–269). New York: Academic Press.
Ferreira, F., & Henderson, J. (1990). The use of verb information in syntactic parsing: Evidence from eye movements and word-by-word self-paced reading.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 555–568.
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage model of the parser.Cognition, 6, 291–326.
Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences.Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178–210.
Holmes, V. M., Kennedy, A., & Murray, W. S. (1987). Syntactic structure and the garden path.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39A, 277–294.
Kennedy, A. (1983). On looking into space. In K. Rayner (Eds.),Eye movements in reading: Perceptual and language processes (pp. 237–250). New York: Academic Press.
Kennedy, A., & Murray, W. S. (1984). Inspection times for words in syntactically ambiguous sentences under three presentation conditions.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 833–849.
Kennedy, A., & Murray, W. S. (1987). Spatial coordinates and reading: Comments on Monk (1985).Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39A, 649–656.
Kennedy, A., Murray, W. S., Jennings, F., & Reid, C. (1989). Parsing complements: Comments on the generality of the principle of minimal attachment.Language and Cognitive Processes, 4, SI 51–76.
Kjelgaard, M. M., & Speer, S. R. (1994). Prosodic structure influences syntactic attachments during the course of sentence comprehension.CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. New York, N.Y.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., Tyler, L. K., Warren, P., Grenier, P., & Lee, C. S. (1992). Prosodic effects in minimal attachment.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45A, 73–87.
McAllister, J., Colrain, I., & Gravatt, B. (1995). Prosodic cues in the interpretation of spoken garden path sentences: Evidence from event related brain potentials.Paper in preparation.
Murray, W. S., & Kennedy, A. (1988). Spatial coding in the processing of anaphor by good and poor readers: Evidence from eye movement analyses.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40A, 693–718.
Murray, W. S., Watt, S. M., & Kennedy, A. (1996). Modality, processing options and the garden path.Language and Cognitive Processes, revision under review.
Nagel, N. H., Shapiro, L. P., Tuller, B., & Nawy, R. (1996). Prosodic influences on the resolution of temporal ambiguity during on-line sentence processing.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 315–340.
Nicol, J. L., & Pickering, M. J. (1993). Processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences: Evidence from semantic priming.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 207–237.
Pynte, J., & Prieur, B. (1996). Prosodic breaks and attachment decisions in sentence parsing.Language and Cognitive Processes, in press.
Rayner, K., & Frazier, L. (1987). Parsing temporarily ambiguous complements.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39A, 657–673.
Selkirk, E. O. (1986). On derived domains in sentence phonology.Phonology Yearbook, 3, 371–405.
Speer, S. R., & Dobroth, K. M. (1993). Rhythmic effects in auditory and visual sentence processing. Paper presented toPsychonomic Society, Washington, D.C.
Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Kello, C. (1993). Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 528–553.
Tyler, L. (1993). Personal communication to Watt, S.
Warren, P., Grabe, E., & Nolan, F. (1995). Prosody, phonology and parsing in closure ambiguities.Language and Cognitive Processes, 10, 6, 457–486.
Watt, S. M. (1992).The auditory parsing of complement sentences. Ph.D., University of Dundee.
Watt, S. M., & Murray, W. S. (1993). ‘Complement’ sentence parsing in the auditory modality.CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Amherst, Mass.
Wright, B., & Garrett, M. (1984). Lexical decision in sentences: Effects of syntactic structure.Memory & Cognition, 12, 31–45.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Watt, S.M., Murray, W.S. Prosodic form and parsing commitments. J Psycholinguist Res 25, 291–318 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01708575
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01708575