Informative Prosodic Boundaries

In principle, a prosodic boundary in an utterance might affect its interpretation in a local, context-independent fashion. In a right-branching language like English, the presence of a large prosodic boundary might signal the end of the current constituent, requiring the following constituent to be attached high in the syntactic tree. We present three listening experiments that test an alternative position suggested in Carlson, Clifton, and Frazier (2001) as the “informative boundary” hypothesis. This hypothesis claims that the interpretation of a prosodic boundary is determined not by its absolute size but by its size relative to relevant certain other boundaries. Experiment 1 confirmed the predictions of this hypothesis in phrases like the old men and women with very large houses, manipulating the boundaries before and and with. Experiment 2 investigated the effect in a variety of diverse syntactic structures, varying syntactic category and status (head vs. nonhead) of the ambiguous constituent. It confirmed the predictions of the informative boundary hypothesis in every structure tested except for `-ly' adverbs that are ambiguous between a manner interpretation and a speaker-evaluation interpretation. Experiment 3 demonstrated that sentence interpretation was affected by the size of the late boundary relative to a relevant early boundary, but not relative to an early boundary that was predicted to be irrelevant.

[1]  I. Lehiste.  Phonetic Disambiguation of Syntactic Ambiguity , 1973 .

[2]  C. Clifton,et al.  Parallel structure: A source of facilitation in sentence comprehension , 1984, Memory & cognition.

[3]  Joël Pynte,et al.  Prosodic Breaks and Attachment Decisions in Sentence Parsing. , 1996 .

[4]  William E. Cooper,et al.  Syntax and Speech , 1980 .

[5]  Hubert Truckenbrodt,et al.  On the Relation between Syntactic Phrases and Phonological Phrases , 1999, Linguistic Inquiry.

[6]  A. Schafer.  Prosodic parsing: The role of prosody in sentence comprehension , 1997 .

[7]  Elisabeth Selkirk,et al.  The Interaction of Constraints on Prosodic Phrasing , 2000 .

[8]  John Robert Ross,et al.  Constraints on variables in syntax , 1967 .

[9]  Mary E. Beckman,et al.  The Parsing of Prosody , 1996 .

[10]  Janet D. Fodor,et al.  The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model , 1978, Cognition.

[11]  A J Schafer,et al.  Intonational Disambiguation in Sentence Production and Comprehension , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[12]  G. Hickok,et al.  Recency preference in the human sentence processing mechanism , 1996, Cognition.

[13]  Bruce Hayes,et al.  Bengali intonational phonology , 1991 .

[14]  J. Pierrehumbert.  The phonology and phonetics of English intonation , 1987 .

[15]  Christoph Scheepers,et al.  Syntactic Attachment and Anaphor Resolution: The Two Sides of Relative Clause Attachment , 1999 .

[16]  Irene Vogel,et al.  Prosodic Structure Above the Word , 1983 .

[17]  Hubert Truckenbrodt,et al.  Phonological phrases : their relation to syntax, focus, and prominence , 1995 .

[18]  Mari Ostendorf,et al.  The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation , 1991 .

[19]  J. Pierrehumbert,et al.  Intonational structure in Japanese and English , 1986, Phonology.

[20]  Mari Ostendorf,et al.  TOBI: a standard for labeling English prosody , 1992, ICSLP.

[21]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  ON COMPREHENDING SENTENCES: SYNTACTIC PARSING STRATEGIES. , 1979 .

[22]  Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel,et al.  The Use of Prosody in Syntactic Disambiguation , 1991, HLT.

[23]  C. Clifton,et al.  Prosodic Boundaries in Adjunct Attachment , 2001 .

[24]  C. Clifton,et al.  Focus in Relative Clause Construal , 1996 .

[25]  Janet Dean Fodor,et al.  Learning To Parse? , 1998 .

[26]  F. Cuetos,et al.  Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the Late Closure strategy in Spanish , 1988, Cognition.

[27]  J. Kimball.  Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language , 1973 .

[28]  L Frazier,et al.  Processing Coordinate Structures , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.