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Abstract:
Previous research comparing spoken questions with
and without
wh
-gaps demonstrated prosodic differences at the potential gap
location, suggesting that syntactic gap locations may be directly
indicated in prosodic structure [1]. However, recent
findings suggest that when potential gap location and syntactic
complement/adjunct structure are manipulated separately, prosodic
phrasing reflects 'sense-unit' constituents sensitive to these
relations, rather than directly reflecting the location of a
syntactic gap [2]. We examined the production of questions
with
wh
-gaps like those in (1) and (2) below, both of which have
complement
to
-clauses.
(1) Which triangle
i
do you want to change the position of ____
i
this time?
(2) Which triangle
i
do you want ____
i
to change the position of the square?
Our production paradigm elicited utterances using
a boardgame-based conversation task. Seven pairs of US
English speakers and 6 pairs of NZ English speakers, naive to the
study's intent, played a series of games. They manipulated
gamepieces from start to goal positions, using a limited set of
object names and syntactic constructions that were learned easily
within an initial practice round and repeated throughout
the game series. Players could not see each other's
gameboards, and had to communicate cooperatively to complete
moves. Permissible utterances included syntactic
ambiguities of several types as well as unambiguous ones.
Utterances produced were 'quasi-spontaneous' speech, reflecting
the pragmatic goals of speakers engaged in a complex
conversational task.
The
wh
-gap studies mentioned above employed reading-based production
tasks, measuring prosodic marking reflected in word and silence
durations, and F0 excursion across the gap site. We
examined game-task productions from two dialects of English,
measuring the incidence of
wanna
-contraction as well as the temporal and intonational
indications of prosodic structure across the gap sites.
Wanna
-contraction was more frequent in the US data, and more likely
in both data-sets when there was no gap between
want
and
to
, as in (1) above. Phonetic analyses indicated that both
groups of speakers consistently lengthened the word and post-word
silence preceding the gap location. ToBI transcriptions of
matched utterance sets showed a range of intonational phrasing
patterns in the vicinity of the potential gap, with prosodic
constituent breaks most often patterning with the location of
major syntactic breaks. Our results do not necessarily
imply that syntactic gaps are directly pronounced in the phonetic
structure of an utterance. Nevertheless, we argue that
phonological regularities, in combination with the prosody-syntax
correspondence rules, may often be available to
comprehenders.
References
[1] Nagel, H. N., Shapiro, L. P., & Nawy, R.
(1994). Prosody and the processing of filler-gap
dependencies. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23,
473-485.
[2] Straub, K., Wilson, C., McCullum, C., &
Badecker, W. (2001). Prosodic structure and
wh
-questions. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30,
379-394.
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