Empirical Investigations of the Role of Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing

Abstract

Recently, psycholinguistics has seen an increase in the number of empirical studies investigating the role of implicit (silent) prosodic representations in reading. The current paper reviews studies from the last several years conducted to investigate Fodor's (2002) Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, which maintains that even during silent reading, readers generate representations of sentence intonation, phrasing, stress, and rhythm, and that these representations can affect readers' interpretation of the text. We argue that the accumulated evidence suggests that implicit prosody can influence online sentence interpretation and explore the implications of these findings for models of sentence processing.

Prosody Growth and Reading Comprehension: A Longitudinal Study from 2nd Through the End of 3er Grade // Evolução da prosódia e compreensão da leitura: Um estudo longitudinal do 2º ano ao final do 3º ano de escolaridade

“…A prosódia, que constitui a capacidade de ler com expressão adequada, entonação e fraseamento, a fim de manter a compreensão de texto (Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, e Meisinger, 2010), é muitas vezes negligenciada. No entanto, uma série de autores (Breen, 2014;Valle, Binder, Walsh, Nemier, e Bangs, 2013) salientam a importância da prosódia na aquisição e desenvolvimento da linguagem, e mais tarde na aprendizagem da leitura.…”

“…Esta constatação sugere que as competências de leitura, tais como o reconhecimento visual da palavra, o fraseamento sintáctico, a desambiguação semântica e sintáctica, etc., estão envolvidas na prosódia e na compreensão da leitura (Allbritton, McKoon, e Ratcliff, 1996;Breen, 2014;Snedeker e Trueswell, 2003). Kuhn et al (2010) afirmam que a leitura com prosódia pode apoiar a compreensão da leitura, embora a direcção do efeito não seja clara.…”

The Role of prosodic skills in reading comprehension

“…Earlier written sentence processing research concentrated on syntax and semantics, largely ignoring the potential contribution of prosody to processing text (Bader, 1998). More recently, psycholinguists, led by the seminal work of Fodor (1998Fodor ( , 2002a and Bader (1998), have investigated the role of prosody in silent reading, providing evidence that readers do indeed implicitly imbue written text with prosody, and that this prosodic information influences reading comprehension (see Breen, 2014 for a review).…”

“…Short term memory processes are postulated to be acoustic, and the reader's memory for each word is strengthened by generating its phonological code, as the sentence unfolds (Gathercole & Baddeley, 2001). Slowiaczek and Clifton hypothesised that words thus are integrated into context by accessing prosodic structure, largely lacking in text, to inform and update both the information (semantics) and syntactical structure of the sentence (Breen, 2014).…”

“…Prosodic features generated while reading silently cannot be observed directly, but can be inferred through careful experimentation (Breen, 2014;Fodor, 2002). The theories of Fodor (1998) and Bader (1998) have provided psycholinguists with frameworks to investigate the role of prosody in written sentence processing, and are discussed next.…”