Prosodic Guidance: Evidence for the Early Use of Capricious Parsing Constraint
Jesse Snedeker, John C. Trueswell · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2001
This experiment examines the use of naturally occurring prosodic cues to syntactic structure.Earlier work suggests that the production of informative prosodic cues depends upon speakers' knowledge of the situation: speakers provide prosodic cues when needed; listeners use these prosodic cues when present (Snedeker et al., 2001).The present experiment explores the online use of prosodic information in a worldsituated eyegaze task.A referential communication paradigm was used to elicit productions of ambiguous sentences (Tap the frog with the flower) and determine whether listeners could use prosodic cues to correctly interpret them.Acoustic analyses indicated that Speakers produced potentially informative prosodic cues.Listeners' responses to the ambiguous sentences strongly reflected the demonstration the Speaker had seen, indicating that they were able to use this information.Analyses of the eye-movements indicate that listeners use prosodic information to inform their parse shortly after the onset of the direct-object noun.