The influence of prosodic phrasal boundaries on the resolution of semantic lexical ambiguity

Abstract

Two experiments explored the effect of two levels of prosodic phrasing, the intonational phrase (IPh), and phonological phrase (PPh), on the interpretation of ambiguous words in sentences. In experiment 1, polysemous words were presented in semantically neutral sentence-initial clauses, followed by either an IPh or PPh boundary. A second clause resolved the ambiguity. End-of-sentence judgment times showed that reanalysis to the subordinate meaning of the ambiguous word took longer following IPh than PPh boundaries, suggesting that more extensive interpretive processing had taken place following the higher-level boundary. In experiment 2, strongly-biased polysemous words were presented in clauses weakly biased toward their subordinate interpretation, followed by either an IPh or PPh boundary. Following IPh boundaries, visually presented semantic associates of the subordinate meaning of the polysemous word were named faster than targets associated with the dominant meaning. This difference was not found for PPh conditions. Phonological and phonetic analyses will be presented. It will be argued that these processing effects cannot be explained solely on the basis of durational differences between IPh and PPh boundaries. The results support the view that the human sentence processor builds a prosodic representation and is guided by it during semantic interpretation. [Work supported by NIMH.]