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Abstract:
There is broad agreement that sentence prosody provides
listeners with important cues regarding the syntactic organization
of utterances, but the exact nature of these cues remains a matter
of debate. One recent study of sentence prosody in wh-constructions
(Nagel, Shapiro and Nawy, 1994) proposed that the location of the
gap is directly signaled by pausing at the gap (and pre-pausal
lengthening). For example, they found the duration of the verb
`call' to be longer in (1a) than in (1b):
(1) a. Which doctor did the supervisor call -- to get help for his
youngest daughter?
b. Which doctor did the supervisor call to get help for -- during
the crisis?
However, in stimuli like (1a), gap location and clausal boundaries
are confounded. An alternative interpretation of their findings is
that it is not the location of the gap that is directly encoded
prosodically, but rather the syntactic scope of the filler-gap
dependency is reflected in the prosodic contour. That is, the
acoustic cues that distinguish (1a) from (1b) provide the listener
with information regarding the clause that contains the gap, and
need not occur at the specific location of the gap itself. To test
this hypothesis, we constructed sentence stimuli in which the gap
and phrasal boundary are varied systematically. (In the following
examples, `--' denote syntactic gaps, and `#' signals a phrasal
boundary.)
(2) a. Whose notes do you plan to study -- # in order to prepare
for our history final?
b. How long do you plan to study in the library -- # in order to
prepare for our history final?
c. Whose notes do you plan to study -- in the library # to prepare
for our history final?
If syntactic gaps are signaled directly, then evidence of this
should be observed in the form of longer pause duration between
`study' and `in' in both (2a) and (2c) in comparison to (2b) (or,
as measured in Nagel et al., in longer pre-pause word + pause
durations in (2a &c)). If instead pause cues occur at the
phrasal boundary, then only (2a) should differ from (2b) at this
location. Participants recorded sentences like (2a-c) embedded in
short discourse contexts, and acoustic analyses (measurements of
pause duration, pre-pause lengthening, and pitch declination) were
carried out on the shared lexical sequences (e.g., `do you plan to
study in'). These analyses indicated that prosodic cues occur at
gap locations only when those locations also coincide with a
phrasal boundary.
Nagel, H.N., L. Shapiro, & R. Nawy. (1994). Prosody and the
processing of filler-gap dependencies. In
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,
23, 473-485.
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