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Title:
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Prosody, Syntax, and the Lexicon in Parsing Ambiguous Sentences
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Author:
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Nivedita Mani
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Oxford
, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics
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Degree Date:
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In Progress
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Phonetics
Psycholinguistics
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Director(s):
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John Coleman
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Abstract:
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My DPhil tests the early incorporation of prosodic information during on-line processing of ambiguous word pairs such as Packing cases. The two alternatives are syntactically ambiguous and prosodically distinct. In an on-line, cross-modal, response-time task, I tested subjects’ responses to appropriate and inappropriate verbs following the ambiguous word pairs. Subjects were able to make accurate parses of the stimuli. Since the word pairs were syntactically ambiguous, this provides evidence in favour of the early incorporation of prosodic information in parsing.
In Experiment 2, I swapped the duration, f0, and amplitude of the noun phrase versions with the verb phrase versions. If prosodic information were guiding parsing, then swapping the prosody of the alternatives should change subjects’ parses of the stimuli. I found that subjects interpreted the noun phrases as verb phrases and the verb phrases as noun phrases. Only the prosodic content of the stimuli could have guided subjects’ parsing towards the parses intended by the cross-synthesised prosody. This provides additional evidence in favour of early prosodic processing.
Acoustic analysis of the speech suggested that the two forms were marked by differences in duration, f0, and amplitude. In Experiment 3, I tested whether subjects’ ability to differentiate the two forms would be affected by flattening the f0 of the word pairs. I found that subjects’ ability to disambiguate the word pairs was reduced by flattening the f0 of the stimuli. Again, this provides evidence in favour of f0 guiding parsing.
Prior research argues that prosodic information is not perceptually salient in the absence of lexical information (Toepel and Alter: 2002). Therefore, Experiment 4 tested the parsing of delexicalised versions of the same stimuli. I found that subjects continued to make accurate parses of the stimuli. This indicates that prosody can guide parsing even without lexical information.
The results of my four experiments provide strong evidence in favour of the early incorporation of prosodic information in parsing. Subjects’ parsing was tested before the completion of the clauses that the fragments were taken from, and before the presentation of the main verb of the sentences. These results indicate that prosodic information can influence on-line parsing even in the presence of contrary syntactic and spectral preferences and in the absence of lexical information. These results have serious implications on models of modular and interactive processing. I consider revisions of both these models in order to allow the early incorporation of prosodic information in processing.
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Page Updated: 28-Nov-2009
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