Abstract
Written sentences can be more ambiguous than spoken sentences. We investigate this difference for two different types of ambiguity: prepositional phrase (PP) attachment and sentences where the addition of commas changes the meaning. We recorded a native English speaker saying several of each type of sentence both with and without disambiguating contextual information. These sentences were then presented either as text or audio and either with or without context to subjects who were asked to select the proper interpretation of the sentence. Results suggest that comma-ambiguous sentences are easier to disambiguate than PP-attachment-ambiguous sentences, possibly due to the presence of clear prosodic boundaries, namely silent pauses. Subject performance for sentences with PP-attachment ambiguity without context was 52% for text only while it was 72.4% for audio only, suggesting that audio has more disambiguating information than text. Using an analysis of acoustic features of two PP-attachment sentences, a simple classifier was implemented to resolve the PP-attachment ambiguity being early or late closure with a mean accuracy of 80%.
Highlights
There are different kinds of ambiguities in sentence construction, which can be challenging for sentence processing, both in speech and in text
Two of them were native English speakers. Their accuracy in identifying which of two possible. These results show that humans are quite good at interpreting comma-ambiguous sentences in both text and speech modalities
Because performance is at ceiling for commaambiguity, we focus our subsequent analysis on the prepositional phrase (PP)-attachment sentences
Summary
There are different kinds of ambiguities in sentence construction, which can be challenging for sentence processing, both in speech and in text. Such ambiguities include structural ambiguities where there can be multiple parse trees for the same sentence. C 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics disambiguation is related more to the presence of boundaries and to some extent the prominence of certain words. When it comes to spontaneous everyday speech, especially by untrained speakers, Tree et al (2000) found that listeners can use prosody to resolve ambiguities, contextual information tends to overwhelm it when present. Krajalic and Brennan (2005) point out that results prior to their own study provide mixed evidence for whether speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities
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