Phrase Length Matters: The Interplay between Implicit Prosody and Syntax in Korean “Garden Path” Sentences

Abstract

In spoken language comprehension, syntactic parsing decisions interact with prosodic phrasing, which is directly affected by phrase length. Here we used ERPs to examine whether a similar effect holds for the on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading, as suggested by theories of "implicit prosody." Ambiguous Korean sentence beginnings with two distinct interpretations were manipulated by increasing the length of sentence-initial subject noun phrases (NPs). As expected, only long NPs triggered an additional prosodic boundary reflected by a closure positive shift (CPS) in ERPs. When sentence materials further downstream disambiguated the initially dispreferred interpretation, the resulting P600 component reflecting processing difficulties ("garden path" effects) was smaller in amplitude for sentences with long NPs. Interestingly, additional prosodic revisions required only for the short subject disambiguated condition-the delayed insertion of an implicit prosodic boundary after the subject NP-were reflected by a frontal P600-like positivity, which may be interpreted in terms of a delayed CPS brain response. These data suggest that the subvocally generated prosodic boundary after the long subject NP facilitated the recovery from a garden path, thus primarily supporting one of two competing theoretical frameworks on implicit prosody. Our results underline the prosodic nature of the cognitive processes underlying phrase length effects and contribute cross-linguistic evidence regarding the on-line use of implicit prosody for parsing decisions in silent reading.

ERP correlates of prosody and syntax interaction in case of embedded sentences

“…Since the CPS has been consistently found in studies investigating the processing of prosodic boundaries (B€ ogels et al, 2010;Hwang & Steinhauer, 2011;Isel et al, 2005;Mietz et al, 2008;Pauker et al, 2011;Steinhauer et al, 1999;Steinhauer, 2003) this result shows that the CPS appears at the closure of intonational phrases. The amplitudes of both CPS components were larger for the incongruent sentences compared to natural sentences.…”

“…When the IPBs are not in the correct position to disambiguate garden-path sentences, a specific ERP response consisting of a biphasic N400 e P600 pattern can be found as demonstrated in several studies (Hwang & Steinhauer, 2011;Isel, Alter, & Friederici, 2005;Steinhauer et al, 1999;Steinhauer, 2003;Mietz, Toepel, Ischebeck, & Alter, 2008;Pauker, Itzhak, Baum, & Steinhauer, 2011;see B€ ogels et al, 2011 for a review), with the P600 component missing in some cases (B€ ogels, Schriefers, Vonk, Chwilla, & Kerkhofs, 2010). This pattern was found for words that disambiguated the sentence towards an interpretation that was not compatible with the syntactic analysis of the sentence, therefore leading to processing problems (B€ ogels et al, 2011).…”

Brain response to prosodic boundary cues depends on boundary position

“…Concerning the impact of contextual prosodic information on prosodic phrasing, Hwang and Steinhauer (2011) used the CPS to demonstrate an influence of phrase length on (implicit) prosodic phrasing (which had previously been shown in behavioral production studies, see above). In a silent reading study on Korean they found that only longer sentence-initial constituents elicited a CPS, while no effect was found for short subject noun phrases.…”

“…Because the ERP component coincides with the closure of major prosodic phrases, it has been termed closure positive shift (CPS). The CPS has been found to indicate the processing of prosodic boundaries in various languages: in German (e.g., Pannekamp et al, 2005; Männel and Friederici, 2009), English (e.g., Itzhak et al, 2010; Steinhauer et al, 2010; Pauker et al, 2011), Dutch (e.g., Kerkhofs et al, 2007; Bögels et al, 2010), Japanese (Wolff et al, 2008), Chinese (Li and Yang, 2009) and Korean (Hwang and Steinhauer, 2011, implicit prosody).…”

A técnica de ERP no processamento de sentenças de crianças: uma revisão

“…Estudos reportaram que o LAN e o ELAN opunham frases neutras, gramaticais, de frases contendo violações sintáticas: a morfossintaxe não estava adequada (concordância ou marcador de caso repetido) ou em sentenças contendo uma combinação de palavras inadequadas (e.g. uma palavra ou grupo de palavras aparecia em um contexto em que palavras de uma categoria sintática diferente eram esperadas -HAGOORT; LEVELT, 2009;HWANG;STEINHAUER, 2011).…”