Parsing local ambiguities in syntactic structures: Prosodic influences

This project comprises a series of experiments investigating the role of prosody--the timing and intonation of an utterance--in syntactic disambiguation. Acoustic analyses isolated two parameters--main-clause verb segment and pause durations, and the pitch contour over the verb and the following phrase--that reliably predicted syntactic structure in two sets of temporarily ambiguous sentences. The manipulation of one of these parameters--verb and pause duration--resulted in increased processing load over the disambiguating region of sentences temporarily ambiguous between a direct object and an embedded clause syntactic structure (e.g., "John knew the answer by heart" vs. "John knew the answer was correct"). Also, differences in the prosodic contours associated with temporarily ambiguous "filler-gap" sentences determined whether or not a gap was posited during on-line sentence processing. These findings suggest that prosodic information is used early, perhaps immediately, to make informed on-line parsing decisions and support a model of sentence processing in which both lexical and prosodic information interact on-line to generate the syntactic representation of an utterance.