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Abstract:
The current body of evidence for the prosodic facilitation of
parsing is mixed (e.g. Watt & Murray, 1996 vs. Kjelgaard &
Speer, 1999), maintaining Nicol's (1996) position that prosody only
provides useful disambiguating information in certain instances.
Part of the explanation for this might be the unreliable and
inconsistent production of prosody by speakers (Allbritton, McKoon
& Ratcliff, 1996). An obvious parallel can be drawn between
prosody in speech and punctuation in writing. Hill (1996) and Hill
& Murray (1997, 1998) have shown clear effects of the
disambiguating potential of punctuation in reading, but again only
in some sentence structures; there is apparent redundancy or
processing neglect in other structures. However, the relationship
between punctuation and prosody cannot be a simple one-to-one
mapping: grammatical rules prevent the inclusion of punctuation at
points where a speaker might pause, and the set of punctuation is
not broad or rich enough to transcribe all the spoken features
categorised as prosody.
It is therefore important to examine the areas of possible
harmonisation whilst clarifying any independence between these two
fundamental features of language. One paradigm for determining an
area of legitimate overlap simply involves having participants read
text aloud. The experiment described here presented participants
with single sentences that had to be read out loud, amongst which
were three classes of temporarily ambiguous garden-path sentences
(prepositional phrase ambiguities, early/late closure ambiguities
and reduced relatives). There were four variants of each
experimental item, corresponding to the four conditions used by
Hill & Murray (1997): a locally ambiguous version expected to
produce a garden path, its unambiguous or preferred counterpart,
and variants of both that contained commas. The task itself
required each presented sentence to be read aloud twice. In the
first "sight reading" instance, oral delivery commenced
simultaneously with visual presentation in order to permit possible
garden pathing through the restriction of reading ahead. In the
second instance, participants should have resolved any potential
ambiguity and could therefore adopt the appropriate prosodic
pattern for the entire sentence. In this way, the on- and off-line
properties of both punctuation and prosody on garden path
structures were determined and directly compared.
Allbritton, D. W., McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (1996).
Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity.
Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning, Memory, and Cognition,
22, 714-735.
Hill, R. L. (1996) A Comma in Parsing: A study into the influence
of punctuation (commas) on contextually isolated "garden-path"
sentences. Unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, Dundee University.
Hill, R. L. & Murray, W. S. (1997) Punctuated parsing:
Signposts along the Garden Path. Poster presented at the CUNY
Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Santa Monica, California,
March 1997.
Hill, R. L. & Murray, W. S. (1998) Commas and Spaces: The
Point of Punctuation. Poster presented at the CUNY Conference on
Human Sentence Processing, New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 1998.
Kjelgaard, M. M., & Speer, S. S. (1999). Prosodic Facilitation
and Interference in the Resolution of Temporary Syntactic Closure
Ambiguity. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(2), 153-194.
Nicol, J. L. (1996). What can prosody tell a parser? Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 179-192.
Watt, S. M., & Murray, W. S. (1996). Prosodic form and parsing
commitments. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25(2), 291-
318.
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