How Prosody Constrains First-Pass Parsing During Reading

Abstract

This chapter reviews several experiments (originally presented at CUNY Conferences on Sentence Processing) that have investigated the role of implicit prosody for syntactic ambiguity resolution. The subject of these experiments is the syntactic ambiguity that arises when a matrix clause in German contains two potential antecedent NPs for an extraposed relative clause. In such cases, the second NP is the preferred construal site for the relative clause, probably for reasons of recency. Experimental evidence shows that the first NP becomes more easily accessible as a construal site if readers are given a reason to stress the first NP. The results of these experiments indicate that stress assignment during reading can affect the syntactic structure chosen during first-pass parsing. The chapter explores this finding in the wider context of effects of implicit prosody on first and second pass parsing.