Abstract
Prosody plays an important role in online sentence processing both explicitly and implicitly. It has been shown that prosodically packaging together parts of a sentence that are interpreted together facilitates processing of the sentence. This applies not only to explicit prosody but also implicit prosody. The present work hypothesizes that a line break in a written text induces an implicit prosodic break, which, in turn, should result in a processing bias for interpreting English wh-questions. Two experiments—one self-paced reading study and one questionnaire study—are reported. Both supported the “line break” hypothesis mentioned above. The results of the self-paced reading experiment showed that unambiguous wh-questions were read faster when the location of line breaks (or frame breaks) matched the scope of a wh-phrase (main or embedded clause) than when they did not. The questionnaire tested sentences with an ambiguous wh-phrase, one that could attach either to the main or the embedded clause. These sentences were interpreted as attaching to the main clause more often than to the embedded clause when a line break appeared after the main verb, but not when it appeared after the embedded verb.
Highlights
Previous psycholinguistic research has established the importance of chunking utterances into prosodic units that are created in accordance with both grammatical (e.g., Cooper and PacciaCopper, 1980; Selkirk, 1984; Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Jun, 2005; Ladd, 2009) and processing constraints
The significant effect of SENTENCE TYPE suggests that sentences with a main clause interpretation (a, b) were, on average, read faster than those with an embedded clause interpretation (c, d) (Main Clause Interpretation vs. Embedded Clause Interpretation: 5673 vs. 6122 ms)
The first region for the Late Break condition for the Main Clause Interpretation was read faster than the corresponding region for the same break condition for the Embedded Clause Interpretation. The data from this experiment indicated that the following region (i.e., Region 2) took less time to read for the Late Break condition for the Main Clause Interpretation than the same break condition for the Embedded Clause Interpretation
Summary
Previous psycholinguistic research has established the importance of chunking utterances into prosodic units that are created in accordance with both grammatical (e.g., Cooper and PacciaCopper, 1980; Selkirk, 1984; Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Jun, 2005; Ladd, 2009) and processing constraints (see e.g., Beckman, 1996; Frazier et al, 2006) These prosodic groups influence listeners’ sentence processing in the spoken domain and readers’ sentence processing in the written domain, i.e., the effect of implicit prosody (e.g., Bader, 1998; Fodor, 2002). Such immediate use of prosodic phrasing has been demonstrated in offline studies but in both eye-tracking (e.g., Snedeker and Trueswell, 2003) and Event Related Potential (ERP) experiments as
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