PubMed · 12690830
Recycling prosodic boundaries.
Abstract
The present study investigates the role of prosodic structure in selecting a syntactic analysis at different stages of parsing in silent reading of Japanese relative clauses. Experiments 1 and 2 (sentence-completion questionnaires) revealed an effect of the length of the sentence-initial constituent on the resolution of a clause boundary ambiguity in Japanese. Experiment 3 (fragment-reading) showed that this length manipulation is also reflected in prosodic phrasing in speech. Its influence on ambiguity resolution is attributed to "recycling" of prosodic boundaries established during the first-pass parse. This explanation is based on the implicit prosody proposals of Bader (1998) and Fodor (1998). Experiment 4 (self-paced reading) demonstrated the immediacy of the influence on ambiguity resolution on-line. Experiment 5 (self-paced reading) found support for the additional prediction that when no boundary is available to be recycled, processing the relative clause construction is more difficult.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Yuki Hirose. 2003. Recycling prosodic boundaries.. https://doi.org/10.1023/a%3A1022448308035
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.