The implicit prosody hypothesis and overt prosody in English

Abstract

This study investigates the validity of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) by examining default phrasing in English, a low attachment language, in overt prosody generated by reading aloud sentences where a complex noun phrase serves as the head of a relative clause (NP1 NP2 RC). The prosodic phrasing of 27 sentences collected from 36 speakers was transcribed by three ToBI-trained labellers. Results show that, counter to the predictions of the IPH, the most common prosodic phrasing was (NP1 NP2)//(RC), which would be expected for high attachment preference languages. This default phrasing was found to be influenced by the length of the RC and by syntactically disambiguating properties of the RC verb (i.e., number agreement) only when the RC was short. It was suggested that the prosody generated in silent reading would not necessarily be the same as the prosody generated in reading aloud, especially when reading without skimming the material in advance. Based on the current results and data from previous studies, various ways to access implicit prosody are proposed.

Empirical Investigations of the Role of Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing

“…Despite the confluence of cross‐linguistic findings supporting a role of implicit prosody in syntactic ambiguity resolution, some data call this relationship into question. Results from Jun () and Bergmann, Armstrong, and Maday () suggest that implicit prosodic phrasing may not be fully consistent with explicit phrasing. Jun () demonstrated that speakers' overt prosodic phrasing of out‐of‐the‐blue productions of sentences with relative clause ambiguities did not match the implicit prosodic phrasing that would have led to the same speakers' interpretations of the ambiguities.…”

The Implicit Prosody of Corrective Contrast Primes Appropriately Intonated Probes (for Some Readers)

“…Although these findings are inconsistent with the notion of a predictable default prosodic contour, it is not possible to know whether parsing preferences in reading were due to "inner speech" contours, because the silent and overt prosodies were necessarily produced on different trials. Jun (2010) has argued that it might not be possible to assess implicit prosody by comparing readers' overt read-aloud prosody to the judgments they make while or after silent reading. The prosody of read speech is easily recognizable as such, and differs substantially from spontaneous speech and "laboratory speech"(speech created for use in experiments), with shorter constituent phrases (so more pitch accents and breaks) (Howell & Kadi-Hanifi, 1991).…”

“…These studies have shown mixed results. For example, Jun and Kim (2004; see also Hwang &Schafer, 2009, andJun &Koike, 2003, for similar experiments with Japanese) conducted production experiments with Korean relative clauses, recording readers who either skimmed a text and then read it aloud, or read aloud without skimming. Participants then completed an off-line syntactic judgment task for the same sentences.…”

“…However, similar work on English has not consistently supported IPH predictions. The most frequently produced prosodic phrasing pattern for ambiguous RC sentences in English read-aloud studies is one where the RC is set off in its own phrase (NP1 NP2)(RC), a pattern consistent with a high attachment preference, when English is generally considered to 'prefer' low-attachment (Jun, 2010). Ito (2007, 2009) asked participants to read ambiguous RC sentences aloud and manipulated the length of N1 and of the RC (e.g.…”

The Role of prosodic skills in reading comprehension

“…A short relative clause (e.g., who cried) cannot form its own prosodic phrase (including a prosodic break), and hence it attaches itself to the preceding words, resulting in local attachment (late closure) (Fodor, 2002a;Jun & Kim, 2004). However, long relative clauses (e.g., who cried all through the night) are processed as one intonational phrase predisposing the reader to high attachment or early closure (Hwang & Schafer, 2009;Jun, 2010). Prosodic phrasing has been manipulated by varying the length of noun phrases and relative clauses.…”