Abstract
During natural speech perception, listeners rely on a wide range of cues to support comprehension, from semantic context to prosodic information. There is a general consensus that prosody plays a role in syntactic parsing, but most studies focusing on ambiguous relative clauses (RC) show that prosodic cues, alone, are insufficient to reverse the preferred interpretation of sentence. These findings suggest that universally preferred structures (e.g., Late Closure principle) matter far more than prosodic cues in such cases. This study explores an alternative hypothesis: that the weak effect of prosody might be due to the influence of various syntactic, lexical-semantic, and acoustic confounding factors, and investigate the consequences of prosodic breaks while controlling these variables. We used Spanish RC sentences in three experimental conditions where the presence and position (following the first or second noun phrase) of prosodic breaks was manipulated. The results showed that the placement of a prosodic break determined sentence interpretation by changing the preferred attachment of the RC. Listeners’ natural preference for low attachment (in the absence of break) was reinforced when a prosodic break was placed after the first noun. In contrast, a prosodic break placed after the second noun reversed the preferred interpretation of the sentence, toward high attachment. We argue that, in addition to other factors, listeners indeed use prosodic breaks as robust cues to syntactic parsing during speech processing, as these cues may direct listeners toward one interpretation or another.
Highlights
The sentence above illustrates how artists exploit prosodic modulations to create a comic effect based on syntactic ambiguity
The resulting model showed a significant effect of Break position (Table 1), suggesting that participants were faster in responding when a break was presented compared to the baseline
Pairwise comparisons revealed that the effect was stronger and more significant when comparing the effect of a Break after NP1 to no Break (z = −3.895, p < 0.001) than NP2 to no break (z = −2.327, p = 0.052)
Summary
The sentence above illustrates how artists exploit prosodic modulations (here, the absence of explicit cues) to create a comic effect based on syntactic ambiguity. On the other, Cuetos and Mitchell (1988) showed that Spanish speakers choose a HA interpretation instead, and that forcing an LA interpretation leads to increased reading times, suggesting higher processing costs (Carreiras, 1992; Carreiras and Clifton, 1999; see Augurzky, 2005) While these findings led to very prolific cross-linguistic research, Gilboy et al (1995) suggested that the observed variability is mostly due to construction types, reflecting syntactic and semantic aspects of RC constructions. In a comprehensive review of cross-linguistic differences in attachment preference, Grillo and Costa (2014) raised important issues about syntactic characteristics of experimental stimuli used in prior studies They convincingly argue that at least some of the studies contain Pseudo-relative (PR) small clauses (Cinque, 1992). Grillo and Costa (2014) recently observed that when controlling for structural characteristics (limiting pseudo-relative availability), speakers adopt an LA preference (Frazier, 1979)
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