Prosodic Facilitation and Interference in the Resolution of Temporary Syntactic Closure Ambiguity

Abstract

Subjects listened to sentences with early closure (e.g.,When Roger leaves the house is dark) or late closure syntax (e.g.,When Roger leaves the house it's dark) and one of three prosodies: cooperating (coinciding prosodic and syntactic boundary), baseline (phonetically neutralized prosodic boundary), and conflicting (prosodic boundary at a misleading syntactic location). Prosodic manipulations were verified by phonetic measurements and listener judgments. Four experiments demonstrated facilitation in speeded phonosyntactic grammaticality judgment, end-of-sentence comprehension, and cross-modal naming tasks: Sentences with cooperating prosody were processed more quickly than those with baseline prosody. Three experiments showed interference: Sentences with conflicting prosody were processed more slowly than those with baseline prosody. All experiments demonstrated a processing advantage for late closure structures in the conflicting and baseline conditions, but no differences between syntactic types in the cooperating condition. Cross-modal naming results showed early syntactic effects due to both high-level and intermediate-level prosodic boundaries. We argue that the initial syntactic structure assigned to an utterance can be determined by its prosodic phonological representation.