The influence of higher level linguistic information on production of duration and pitch patterns at syntactic boundaries

Abstract

Syntactic parsing strategies like “minimal attachment” have mainly been studied for written language. However, there is recent interest in whether parsing strategies are used for speech. An alternative view is that, because speech contains acoustic patterns that covary with structure, and these influence listeners' syntactic interpretations, acoustic patterns can indicate structure, and so strategies are unnecessary. A critical assumption of the latter view remains to be tested: Speakers reliably produce acoustic correlates of structure for minimal and nonminimal attachment sentences. The present study investigated this, comparing productions of minimal and nonminimal attachment sentences. Longer duration and more extreme pitch fall-rise were expected for a sentence containing a major syntactic boundary in the critical region (i.e., nonminimal attachment). Surprisingly, phrase-final lengthening did not appear; duration for the syntactic boundary condition was shorter. Additional experiments suggest why. When subjects assign sentence-focus-stress to material in the critical region of a no-boundary sentence, stress is represented by increased duration or pitch rise. Thus both syntactic and nonsyntactic linguistic information influence the form of the acoustic patterns produced, and determine whether the expected differences are observable across sentences. Implications for parsing models and for investigations of speech production and perception will be discussed.