Effects of Implicit Prosody and Semantic Bias on the Resolution of Ambiguous Chinese Phrases.

Miao Yu,Brandon Sommers,Guoli Yan,Yuxia Yin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01308

Miao Yu, Brandon Sommers + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01308

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Abstract

By manipulating the location of prosodic boundary and the semantic bias of the ambiguous “V+N1+de+N2” phrase, which is composed of one verb (V), one noun (N1), one functional word (de), and another noun (N2), this study investigated how prosodic boundary and the semantic bias affect the processing of temporary ambiguous sentences formed by the ambiguous phrase “V+N1+de+N2” through an eye movement experiment. We found the effect of prosodic boundary in the late processing stage and observed an interaction between prosodic boundary and the semantic bias of ambiguous phrases as well. The participants required more time for fixation and more regressions occurred when the meaning of the ambiguous phrase guided by prosodic boundary was inconsistent with context, especially when the ambiguous phrase was biased to the narrative-object phrase. This result suggests that prosodic boundary affects the processing of temporal ambiguous sentences and is influenced by the semantic bias of the ambiguous phrase. These findings provide further evidence from Chinese that indicate that implicit prosody plays a general role in language comprehension.

Highlights

IntroductionAs an important part of spoken language, prosodic information is a necessary means of language communication, which helps the listener to interpret syntactic structure and semantic information, so as to understand the utterance more clearly
Sentence processing is the process in which readers make use of a variety of information sources, such as lexical and syntactic information, semantic information, prosodic information etc., to extract syntactic structure and integrate meaning.Research over the past 20 years has strongly suggested that prosody plays a very important role at multiple levels in the parsing process (Grabe et al, 1994; Snedeker and Trueswell, 2003; Watson and Gibson, 2005; Dahan, 2015).As an important part of spoken language, prosodic information is a necessary means of language communication, which helps the listener to interpret syntactic structure and semantic information, so as to understand the utterance more clearly
By manipulating the location of prosodic boundary and semantic bias of “V+N1+de+N2” phrases, this study adopted the eye tracker to investigate the effect of prosodic boundary on ambiguity resolution in the two types of “V+N1+de+N2” ambiguous phrases, one being the narrative-noun biased structure and the other being the balanced ambiguous structure

Summary

Introduction

As an important part of spoken language, prosodic information is a necessary means of language communication, which helps the listener to interpret syntactic structure and semantic information, so as to understand the utterance more clearly. Almost every aspect of prosody is conducive to the processing of spoken information. A vast amount of literature has confirmed prosodic information plays a very important role in speech production (e.g., Katz et al, 1996; Fodor, 1998; Steinhauer et al, 1999; Schafer et al, 2000; Clifton et al, 2002; Bradley et al, 2003; Fernández, 2007; Millotte et al, 2007; Li et al, 2010; Kentner, 2012; Tyler, 2013).

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