Abstract
AbstractA controlled reading experiment reveals that stress-based linguistic rhythm impinges on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent and oral reading. The results suggest that, at points of syntactic underspecification, the accruing prosodic representation may affect even the earliest stages of structure building, viz. the analysis of syntactic features of an ambiguous word. Such an effect remains inexplicable in the context of (psycho-)linguistic theories that assume a strictly unidirectional relationship between syntactic and phonological processes, the latter merely interpreting the conditions the syntactic component imposes on it. Here, a performance compatible grammar in the framework of Optimal Parsing is presented that is capable of capturing the reading data. The model integrates syntactic parsing and prosodification in reading and predicts that, at points of syntactic indetermination, weak prosodic constraints alone may guide syntactic structure assignment. This suggests a bidirectional relationship between syntax and phonology in grammar and processing while, at the same time, confirming a tight coupling of language production and comprehension.
Highlights
Readers generate from the graphemic string an intrinsic auditory version of the text entailing rich prosodic structure
If disambiguating material later in the sentence requires an accent on the preceding ambiguous word, various measures of reading behavior point to processing difficulties, indicating that the syntactic analysis is directly conditioned by the prosodic rendition of the sentence in reading
The prosodic effect on syntactic structure building seems to be immediate in the sense that it affects the earliest imaginable stage of syntactic analysis, namely the retrieval of the word’s lexical-syntactic category
Summary
Readers generate from the graphemic string an intrinsic auditory version of the text entailing rich prosodic structure. Hirose (2003) and Hwang and Steinhauer (2011) suggest that already during first pass parsing, syntactic analysis and prosodic representation are integrated, advocating early interaction of these domains in processing Their experiments concern prosodic balance with respect to syntactic attachment preferences for long versus short phrases. On the basis of the empirical evidence, we propose and advocate a parsing model which makes explicit reference to an optimality theoretic competence grammar integrating constraints from the domains of syntax, phonology and the corresponding interface (Section 3).
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