The implicit prosody hypothesis and overt prosody in English

Abstract

This study investigates the validity of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) by examining default phrasing in English, a low attachment language, in overt prosody generated by reading aloud sentences where a complex noun phrase serves as the head of a relative clause (NP1 NP2 RC). The prosodic phrasing of 27 sentences collected from 36 speakers was transcribed by three ToBI-trained labellers. Results show that, counter to the predictions of the IPH, the most common prosodic phrasing was (NP1 NP2)//(RC), which would be expected for high attachment preference languages. This default phrasing was found to be influenced by the length of the RC and by syntactically disambiguating properties of the RC verb (i.e., number agreement) only when the RC was short. It was suggested that the prosody generated in silent reading would not necessarily be the same as the prosody generated in reading aloud, especially when reading without skimming the material in advance. Based on the current results and data from previous studies, various ways to access implicit prosody are proposed.