Prosodic Facilitation in the Resolution of Syntactic Ambiguities in Subjects with Left and Right Hemisphere Damage

Effects of Cooperating and Conflicting Prosody in Spoken English Garden Path Sentences: ERP Evidence for the Boundary Deletion Hypothesis

“…In spoken sentences, this reanalysis may involve the mental creation of a new boundary after verb1, which according to the boundary deletion hypothesis, should be rather easy. Our P600 finding extends previous behavioral data investigating similar structures (Walker et al, 2001;Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999) and supports the guiding role of the LC principle in spoken sentences that lack prosodic boundaries.…”

“…However, not all findings have been consistent with this view. For instance, Walker, Fongemie, and Daigle (2001) confirmed the decisive role of prosodic boundaries in spoken EC/LC sentences, but did not find evidence for an overall advantage for LC structures. Similarly, Steinhauer and colleagues tested EC/LC ambiguities in German, employing both spoken (Steinhauer, Alter, & Friederici, 1999) and written sentences , and observed particularly strong garden path effects in LC sentences.…”

“…In their EC garden path sentence, such an alternative revision is not possible, nor is it in other studies that employed lexical NPs and did not find the LC advantage Walker et al, 2001). …”

“…First, 40 EC and LC sentence pairs in English (A and B in Table 1) were either adopted from previous studies (24 ;Walker et al, 2001;Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999), or were constructed anew following the same schema (16). The first VP in each sentence pair contained an optionally transitive main verb (e.g., is approaching), compatible with both LC and EC structures.…”

Neural substrates of linguistic prosody: Evidence from syntactic disambiguation in the productions of brain-damaged patients

“…Whereas the majority of studies of the production (and perception; see e.g., Heilman et al, 1984;Pell & Baum, 1997a;Weintraub et al, 1981) of linguistic prosody in brain-damaged patients have concentrated on global acoustic cues to sentence type (i.e., declarative vs. interrogative vs. imperative), there has recently been a surge of interest in more subtle, but extremely important linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues in both normal speech production (e.g., Beach, 1991;Grabe & Warren, 1995;Nagel et al, 1994;Price et al, 1991), as well as in production by brain-damaged patients (e.g., Grela & Gandour, 1998;Schirmer et al, 2001;Walker et al, 2004; see also Grosjean & Hirt, 1996;Marslen-Wilson et al,.1992;Nagel et al, 1994;Shapiro & Nagel, 1995;Walker et al, 2001;2004 for data on perception). Of particular relevance to the present investigation are a number of investigations that have examined the ability of brain-damaged patients to mark syntactic boundaries using prosodic cues.…”