Biomedical subjects

H N Nagel

Publications and source records attributed to H N Nagel.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1996

Prosodic influences on the resolution of temporary ambiguity during on-line sentence processing.

We present three experiments designed to investigate the role of prosody during sentence processing. The first investigated the question of whether an utterance's prosodic contour influences its comprehension on-line. We spliced the beginning and end portions of direct object and embedded clause sentences and observed the consequent effects on comprehension using a dual-task procedure to measure processing load. Our second experiment sought to determine whether the constituent structure of these sentences could be reliably predicted using prosodic information. We found that the duration and F0 contour associated with the main-clause verb and the following NP reliably distinguished between the direct object and embedded clause constructions. In the final experiment, we manipulated the duration of the main-clause verb and found that subjects used this information to guide their initial parse during on-line sentence comprehension. The need for a model of sentence processing that addresses the use of prosodic information is discussed.

Cognition↗

PubMed1995

Lexical properties, prosody, and syntax: implications for normal and disordered language.

This paper is primarily about sentence processing in neurologically intact subjects--but carries with it the underlying message that though both grammatical and on-line analyses of agrammatism have borne considerable fruit, there is much about the efforts from normal psycholinguistics that has yet to find its way into investigations of aphasia. We describe some of our psycholinguistic work and show how it has influenced our work in aphasia. This work involves three different kinds of information that the human sentence processing system appears to exploit: (1) lexical properties, particularly those having to do with verbs; (2) syntactic operations that connect one position in the sentence to another, nonadjacent position; and (3) prosody, which is often overlooked but which may turn out to be crucial to accounts of both normal and disordered sentence processing. Finally, we suggest that lexical properties interact with prosody to help the parser in its initial analysis.

Aphasia, Broca↗

PubMed1994

Prosody and the processing of filler-gap sentences.

This study was designed to explore the effects of linguistic prosody on the processing of "filler-gap" sentences. We designed two experiments to determine first whether the sentence processor uses information contained in the prosodic contour of an utterance during on-line processing, and second the form that information may take. In Experiment 1, we found that prosody apparently influences when listeners posit gaps on-line. In Experiment 2, we obtained acoustic evidence that gaps are represented in the prosodic contour of an utterance. The results of this study support a view in which prosody contributes very early to on-line structure building mechanisms during sentence processing.

Cognition↗