Searching High and Low: Prosodic Breaks Disambiguate Relative Clauses

Abstract

During natural speech perception, listeners rely on a wide range of cues to support comprehension, from semantic context to prosodic information. There is a general consensus that prosody plays a role in syntactic parsing, but most studies focusing on ambiguous relative clauses (RC) show that prosodic cues, alone, are insufficient to reverse the preferred interpretation of sentence. These findings suggest that universally preferred structures (e.g., Late Closure principle) matter far more than prosodic cues in such cases. This study explores an alternative hypothesis: that the weak effect of prosody might be due to the influence of various syntactic, lexical-semantic, and acoustic confounding factors, and investigate the consequences of prosodic breaks while controlling these variables. We used Spanish RC sentences in three experimental conditions where the presence and position (following the first or second noun phrase) of prosodic breaks was manipulated. The results showed that the placement of a prosodic break determined sentence interpretation by changing the preferred attachment of the RC. Listeners’ natural preference for low attachment (in the absence of break) was reinforced when a prosodic break was placed after the first noun. In contrast, a prosodic break placed after the second noun reversed the preferred interpretation of the sentence, toward high attachment. We argue that, in addition to other factors, listeners indeed use prosodic breaks as robust cues to syntactic parsing during speech processing, as these cues may direct listeners toward one interpretation or another.

Beat Gestures and Syntactic Parsing: An ERP Study

“…Second, we measured the behavioral consequences of the alignment of beat gestures with critical words in sentences. We hypothesized that, by virtue of their attention effects, beats could have an impact on the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences, similar to acoustic prosodic cues (Fromont et al., ). However, according to the behavioral results, choice probability (percentage of HA) did not reveal any modulation in sentence interpretations as a function of the position of the beat.…”

“…Auditory prosody, conveyed by pitch accent, lengthening, or silent breaks, has already been shown to facilitate online spoken comprehension by cuing the correct parsing of sentences (Cutler & Norris, ; Gordon & Lowder, ; Lehiste, ; Quené & Port, ). For example, prosodic breaks together with a rising of the fundamental frequency (f0) help listeners segment the signal into intonational phrases and facilitate decoding the syntactic structure (Clifton, Carslon, & Frazier, ; Frazier, Carslon, & Clifton, ; Fromont, Soto‐Faraco, & Biau, ). Remarkably, given their temporal alignment with prosodic modulations in the speaker's voice (f0), beats have been hypothesized to be the visual expression of speech prosody and impact the perceived saliency of targeted words, even in the absence of acoustic markers of accent (Krahmers & Swerts, ; Leonard & Cummins, ; McNeill, ).…”

No longer an orphan: evidence for appositive attachment from sentence comprehension

“…We also observed that appositives preferred high attachments to a greater degree overall than comparable restrictive relative clauses. This may be explained by appealing to well-understood effects of prosodic juncture on attachment preferences (Clifton et al 2002;Fodor 2002;Jun 2003;Watson & Gibson 2005;Hemforth et al 2015;Fromont et al 2017). In particular, the comma used in our materials to convey an appositive structure also conveys a prosodic break, and is thus predicted to inhibit attachment to the immediately preceding NP.…”

Perception of prosodic boundaries by naïve listeners in three different types of subordinate syntactic constructions

“…During natural speech perception, listeners rely on a wide range of cues to support comprehension, from prosodic information to semantic context. Prosodic boundaries have been shown to be linked with syntactic boundaries (e. g. [1]; [2]), but the association is usually documented and recognized for large constituents [3]; [4] e.g. independent and/or complex clauses.…”

“…Production studies on the prosodic characteristics of syntactic subordination in spontaneous speech have shown that subordinate constructions display different degrees of prosodic autonomy depending on their syntactic type [5]; [6]. This study focuses on adverbial clauses, appositive clauses, and restrictive relative clauses, as illustrated in examples (1)(2)(3). In (1), the adverbial clause restricts the spatial scope in which the referential elements must be understood.…”