Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic ambiguity in discourse context
Shari R. Speer, Shari Baron Sokol, Amy J. Schafer, Paul Warren · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1999
A cooperative boardgame task was used to examine how native speakers use prosodic structure to resolve syntactic ambiguity in discourse context. The game task required two speakers to use utterances from a predetermined set to negotiate the movement of gamepieces to goal locations. In one condition, the discourse contained two situations that had to be described using the same syntactically ambiguous word sequence. In the other condition, an identical syntactically ambiguous structure was used to describe only one situation. Sentences that could describe two situations had an ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment as in ‘‘I want to move the square with the triangle,’’ in which the move involved either a combined square-and-triangle piece or a triangle pushing a square to another position. Sentences describing only one situation involved only a cylinder pushing the square as in ‘‘I want to move the square with the cylinder.’’ Phonological analyses and phonetic analyses of duration and fundamental frequency were compared. Results indicate that speakers used prosodic phrasing to reflect situational syntactic ambiguity. Examples of relatively high and low variability in production will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH grant MH-51768, NZ/USA Cooperative Science Programme grant CSP95/01, Marsden Fund grant VUW604, and NIH research DC-00029.]