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Abstract:
A topic of currently increasing interest in spoken language
research is the influence of prosodic parameters on the initial
interpretation of an utterance. Less effort has been spent on the
question as to which extent punctuation drives the early decisions
of a reader and whether acoustic and visual cues are equally
efficient. Employing an Early versus Late Closure (EC/LC) ambiguity
in German, we were able to demonstrate the immediate use of
prosodic information in a recent auditory ERP (event-related brain
potential) study (Steinhauer, Alter, & Friederici, 1999). This
study has now been repeated in the domain of written language. The
brain activity of 16 participants was recorded while they read the
EC/LC ambiguous sentences and had to perform in both a
comprehension task and an 'easy/difficult-to-read' judgment task.
Prosodic boundary cues were mimicked by a comma in compatible as
well as in incompatible sentences.
The major results of the present study are:
1. Spoken and written cues are
equally efficient in marking boundaries and in driving initial
parsing decisions.
2. The ERPs reveal, however, that
the underlying processing of boundaries in the visual modality
differs from that in the auditory modality.
3. The P600 component in the ERP
may reflect both structural and prosodic revisions.
4. The boundary-induced reversed
EC-LC garden-path turned out to be much harder than the classical
LC-EC garden-path. This difference can either be explained
structurally (Gorrell, 1995), or prosodically.
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