Intonational phrasing and constituency in language production and comprehension*

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between intonational phrase boundaries and syntax in production and comprehension. Watson & Gibson (2004a) proposed that the likelihood of an intonational boundary at a word boundary is a function of 1) the size of the most recently completed constituent and 2) the size of the upcoming constituent if it is not an argument of the most recent head. We explore an alternate hypothesis to (1): the distance of integration between an upcoming word and its attachment site in the sentence influences the likelihood of an intonational boundary. In a production experiment (Experiment 1), we found that speakers’ intonational phrasing patterns were consistent with Watson & Gibson's original hypothesis. We then present two studies of sentence comprehension using converging paradigms which test the hypothesis that listeners exploit the relationship between syntax and the production‐based intonational boundaries by using a special parsing heuristic. In particular, we propose that listeners prefer not to attach incoming words to lexical heads that are followed by an intonational boundary. This hypothesis is validated in both Experiments 2 and 3.