Acoustic cues to syntatic structure

Abstract

Duration and fundamental frequency (f0) are used by listeners in on-line sentence processing as cues to syntactic structure [H. Nagel, L. P. Shapiro, and R. Nawy, J. Psycholing. Res. 23, 473–485 (1994)]. Research suggests, however, that speakers may not reliably use duration and f0 to disambiguate syntactic structures [D. W. Albritton, G. McKoon, and R. Ratcliff, J. Exp. Psych. 22, 714–735 (1996)]. The present study explored prosodic differences in a variety of syntactic structures for sentences read by five speakers. Speakers failed to utilize f0 or duration to disambiguate verbs followed by either a direct object or sentential clause; this finding does not support Nagel et al.’s (1994) results for one speaker. In contrast, intransitive verbs were characterized by longer durations and greater f0 excursion as compared to transitive verbs. Acoustic differences for noun phrases (NPs) following transitive and intransitive verbs also were present; NPs following transitive verbs were longer in duration and were associated with a steeper f0 change, as compared to NPs following intransitive verbs. The results suggest that speakers may distinguish some but not all syntactic structures using the prosodic cues of f0 and duration; implications for theories of on-line sentence processing will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH DC00494, DC03347.]