| |
Abstract:
The constraints that prosody imposes on sentence
structure building are subject to recent parsing research.
Most studies deal with prosodic disambiguation effects on the
processing of ambiguous syntactic structures. Besides, the
role of prosody in predictive parsing is discussed. There
is some evidence that prosody may help to identify the base
position (the gap or trace) of a fronted constituent (Nagel,
Shapiro, & Nawy, 1994). It has been suggested that
prosodic information gives indirect rather than direct hints to
the location of gaps (Straub, Wilson, & Badecker,
2001).
In a series of cross-modal lexical priming
experiments, we explored prosodic effects on gap-filling in
German verb-final sentences. Crucially, verb-specific
subcategorization information that might license the gap is not
available in a preverbal position. We claim that German
intonation structure gives a hint to the location of a preverbal
object gap. The neutral sentence accent typically falls on
the constituent immediately preceding the sentence-final verb
(Féry, 1993). This regularity might help to predict
the sentence-final verb position. As the verb is adjacent
to the direct object's base position, the parser might exploit
the predictability of the verb position for the identification of
the preverbal gap. To test for this possibility, we
presented (1) sentences with neutral accentuation (NA) and (2)
sentences with contrastive accentuation of the sentence-final
verb (VA).
|
(1)
|
Der Krug(i) ist [einem jungen
Richter des Berliner (c) GeRICHTS (t(i))
zerbrochen]
|
NA
|
|
(2)
|
Der Krug(i) ist einem jungen
Richter des Berliner (c) Gerichts (t(i))
[zerBROchen]
|
VA
|
|
|
the+NOM jug is a+DAT young judge
of the Berlin court broken
|
|
|
|
'The jug broke on a young judge
of the Berlin court.'
|
|
In Experiment 1, (1) yielded shorter lexical
decision times for identical targets in the gap position (t(i))
as compared to a control position (c). No difference was
found for unrelated targets. In Experiment 2, the
reactivation effect found for identical targets in (1) was
replicated. By contrast, no similar effect for identical
targets was found in (2). In Experiment 3, there was no
decision time difference for identical or unrelated targets with
respect to probe positions in (2). We conclude that
prosodic information is used to license a direct object gap in
German neutrally focused verb-final sentences.
References
Féry, Caroline (1993). German
intonational patterns. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Nagel, H. Nicholas, Shapiro, Lewis P., & Nawy,
Rebecca (1994). Prosody and the processing of filler-gap
sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23, 473 -
485.
Straub, Kathleen, Wilson, Colin, McCollum,
Courtney, & Badecker, William (2001). Prosodic
structure and wh-questions. Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research, 30, 379 - 394.
|
