Is it all relative? Effects of prosodic boundaries on the comprehension and production of attachment ambiguities

Snedeker, Jesse; Casserly, Elizabeth D.

doi:10.1080/01690960903525499

Cited by 40 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(56 reference statements)

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“…This strategy is valid, the authors argue, because it reflects the dependency between intonational‐phrase boundaries and syntactic constituency. A similar view is held by Snedeker and colleagues . This class of accounts is rooted in cue‐integration approaches, which dominate research on visual and auditory perception .…”

Section: The Contribution Of Prosody To Syntactic Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody and language comprehension

Dahan

2015

WIRES Cognitive Science

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This review provides a summary of the most recent advances on the study of how prosody is used during language comprehension. Prosody is characterized as an abstract structure composed of discrete tonal elements aligned with the segmental composition of the sentence organized in constituents of increasing size, and this structure is influenced by the phonological, syntactic, and informational structures of the sentence. Here, we discuss evidence that listeners are affected by prosody when establishing those linguistic structures. Prosody has been shown to influence the segmentation of the utterance into syllables and words, and, in some cases, whether a syllable or word is judged to be present or not. The literature on how prosody informs the structural relationship between words and phrases is also discussed, contrasting views that assume a direct (albeit probabilistic) link between syntax and prosody with those that posit a complex interface between syntax and prosodic structure. Finally, the role of prosody in conveying important aspects pertaining to the sentence's information structure (i.e., which parts of the sentence's meaning are highlighted and brought forward to the discourse, which ones are presupposed and left in the background, which attitudes are being conveyed about the concepts or propositional content) has long been recognized. Current research focuses on which prosodic elements contribute to marking the dimensions (or semantic primitives) of the information structure.

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Section: The Contribution Of Prosody To Syntactic Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody and language comprehension

Dahan

2015

WIRES Cognitive Science

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“…Hence, the occurrence as well as the strength of a preceding boundary affected the perception of a subsequent boundary, as revealed by the listeners' parsing preferences. More recent evidence for this impact of relative prosodic boundary strength on the perception of prosodic boundaries comes from Snedeker and Casserly (2010), as well as Wagner and Crivellaro (2010). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Brain response to prosodic boundary cues depends on boundary position

Holzgrefe¹,

Wellmann²,

Petrone³

et al. 2013

Front. Psychol.

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Prosodic information is crucial for spoken language comprehension and especially for syntactic parsing, because prosodic cues guide the hearer's syntactic analysis. The time course and mechanisms of this interplay of prosody and syntax are not yet well-understood. In particular, there is an ongoing debate whether local prosodic cues are taken into account automatically or whether they are processed in relation to the global prosodic context in which they appear. The present study explores whether the perception of a prosodic boundary is affected by its position within an utterance. In an event-related potential (ERP) study we tested if the brain response evoked by the prosodic boundary differs when the boundary occurs early in a list of three names connected by conjunctions (i.e., after the first name) as compared to later in the utterance (i.e., after the second name). A closure positive shift (CPS)—marking the processing of a prosodic phrase boundary—was elicited for stimuli with a late boundary, but not for stimuli with an early boundary. This result is further evidence for an immediate integration of prosodic information into the parsing of an utterance. In addition, it shows that the processing of prosodic boundary cues depends on the previously processed information from the preceding prosodic context.

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“…This ambiguity can be resolved by prosodic features, namely the placement of a short pause either after saw, signaling that the man had the telescope, or after man, signaling that the boy used the telescope to see the man. Many studies have looked at children's and adults' ability to use prosodic cues in ambiguous domains, including adjunct attachment, as in the telescope example above (Carlson et al, 2001;Snedeker and Yuan, 2008;Snedeker and Casserly, 2010), compounds vs. lists, as in "fruit-salad and oranges" vs. "fruit, salad, and oranges" (Wells et al, 2004;Good, 2008), and adjective-noun strings, as in 'yellow-jacket' as a compound (insect) vs. a phrase (jacket) (Vogel and Raimy, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical bias and prosodic cues: An eye-tracking study of compound/phrase disambiguation

Gamache

2013

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Despite compounds and phrases exhibiting distinct prosodic cues (e.g., pitch and duration), adults fail to use these cues in certain contexts. In two eye-tracking experiments, I examined English speakers' attention to prosody in adjective-noun string disambiguation to explore a lexical bias previously reported (e.g., 'hot dog' is interpreted as the food, regardless of prosody.) In experiment 1, 24 participants were presented with pictures of the compound and phrasal representations for possible compounds (20 known, 10 novel) accompanied by an audio presentation of either a phrasal or compound production. Replicating previous findings, participants sometimes ignored prosody and exhibited biases towards compound pictures for common compounds and towards phrasal pictures for novel compounds. The fixation data reveals similar patterns in which participants appeared to not consider the alternative picture, even when it matched available prosodic cues. In experiment 2, the phrasal/compound pictures were decoupled and placed with unrelated distractors and participants were asked whether either picture matched the audio presentation of a phrasal or compound production. This experiment helps to determine whether the exhibited lexical bias is an artifact of experimental designs using minimal pairs or whether prosody is still ignored when frequency and novelty are not directly competing.

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Is it all relative? Effects of prosodic boundaries on the comprehension and production of attachment ambiguities

Cited by 40 publications

References 30 publications

Prosody and language comprehension

Prosody and language comprehension

Brain response to prosodic boundary cues depends on boundary position

Lexical bias and prosodic cues: An eye-tracking study of compound/phrase disambiguation

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