Prosodic Disambiguation of Early Closure/Late Closure Sentences
Christa Hansen · KU ScholarWorks (The University of Kansas) · 1999
Chnsta Hansen Umversity of KansasParticipants hstened to a syntactically ambiguous strmg (e g When that moves the square ) spoken with one of three prosodies Cooperatmg (prosodic boundary comcides with syntactic boundary), confhctmg (pro!.odic boundary differs from syntactic boundary), and ambiguous (equal or no prosodic breaks at both syntactic boundaries) They selected an early closure syntax contmuation or a late closure syntax contmuation, m one of two segmental condit10ns Iii or /w/ Sentence contmuatlons were either the ongmally recorded sentence contmuatlons (e g early closure will encounter a cookie, late closure it should land m a good spot) or a set of contmuatlons that counterbalanced phrase-imtial phonological mformation with syntactic structure (e g early closure is shut out from the best path, late closure we'll encounter a problem) The experiment demonstrated that pro!.odic phrasmg differentially affected selection accuracy (per cent correct and Judgment confidence) Regardless of mitial phonological mformatlon, sentence fragments with cooperatmg prosody demonstrated greatest accuracy, those with ambiguous prosody had a smaller degree of accuracy, and fragments with confhctmg prosody were identified least accurately In fact, confhctmg prosody for late closure sentences resulted m ffi1Sidentificat10n We argue that naive listeners can use prosodic structure to detefffilne the syntactic structure assigned to an utterance