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Abstract:
In this presentation, we investigate whether
prosody is used in first pass parsing or in reanalysis in
language comprehension. A number of researchers have
found that prosody reduces difficulty associated with
dispreferred continuations of locally ambiguous structures,
suggesting that prosody plays an early role in parsing (Speer
& Kjelgaard, 1996; Marslen-Wilson et al., 1996; see Cutler
et al., 1997, for a review). However, it is not clear
whether this reduction in difficulty is due to prosody's
influence on first pass parsing or prosody's influence on
subsequent reanalysis (Frazier & Clifton, 1996).
We address this question by testing unambiguous
items using a cross-modal lexical decision task.
Participants listened to sentences like (1) up to the end of
the direct object "picture". Then they performed a visual
lexical decision task for either a word which was unambiguously
an argument of the immediately preceding noun ("of", an
argument of "picture" in (1)) or a word which was unambiguously
an argument of the verb ("to", an argument of "gave" in
(1)). The tone on the word "picture" was manipulated so
that it signaled either the presence of an intonational phrase
boundary (H* L-L%) or the absence of an intonational boundary
(H*). In verb-NP-PP sequences such as in (1), an
intonational boundary typically occurs before the preposition
in the VP attachment continuation, whereas a boundary usually
does not occur before the preposition in the NP attachment
continuation (Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980; Price et
al. 1991; Pynte & Prieur, 1996; Schafer et al.,
2001).
If prosodic information is used in first-pass
linguistic structure-building, lexical decisions will be faster
for the locally attached preposition "of" than for the
non-locally attached preposition "to" when there is no boundary
tone on "picture". The reverse pattern is predicted when
a prosodic boundary is present: RTs to "to" should be faster
than RTs to "of". If prosody is accessed only after a
syntax-first parser makes an error, no interaction is predicted
since the items are unambiguous and at no point does reanalysis
occur.
Analyses of the data revealed an interaction
between the boundary and attachment site conditions
(F1(1,27)=6.56, p<.05; F2(1,19) = 3.29, p=.08). In
particular, in the prosodic boundary conditions, RTs were
slower for the locally attached preposition "of" than for the
non-locally attached preposition "to" (601 ms vs. 576 ms), but
in the no boundary conditions, RTs were slower for the
non-locally attached preposition than for the locally attached
preposition (613 ms vs. 598ms). This result supports the
hypothesis that prosodic information is used in first-pass
linguistic structure-building, and is difficult to reconcile
with the hypothesis that prosodic information is used only in
later stages of linguistic structuring.
Example
(1) The detective gave the picture
... OF (NP) / TO (VP)
Boundary
H*L-L%
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