Abstract
We present three experiments designed to investigate the role of prosody during sentence processing. The first investigated the question of whether an utterance's prosodic contour influences its comprehension on-line. We spliced the beginning and end portions of direct object and embedded clause sentences and observed the consequent effects on comprehension using a dual-task procedure to measure processing load. Our second experiment sought to determine-whether the constituent structure of these sentences could be reliably predicted using prosodic information. We found that the duration and F0 contour associated with the main-clause verb and the following NP reliably distinguished between the direct object and embedded clause constructions. In the final experiment, we manipulated the duration of the main-clause verb and found that subjects used this information to guide their initial parse during on-line sentence comprehension. The need for a model of sentence processing that addresses the use of prosodic information is discussed.
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The work reported in this paper was supported in part by NTH grant DC00494.
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Nagel, H.N., Shapiro, L.P., Tuller, B. et al. Prosodic influences on the resolution of temporary ambiguity during on-line sentence processing. J Psycholinguist Res 25, 319–344 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01708576
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01708576