Abstract
Two experiments investigate the effect of sentence familiarity and constituent length on the production of prosodic boundaries in syntactically ambiguous sentences such as The brother N1 of the bridegroom N2 who swims RC was last seen on Friday night, where the person swimming can be either the brother (high attachment) or the bridegroom (low attachment). Participants read aloud sentences with short and long N1s and RCs either on the fly or after forced disambiguation. Productions were coded for prosodic boundary strength at N1 and N2 using the ToBI annotation system. The results suggest that when reading aloud unfamiliar sentences, local syntactic cues drive prosodic structure and this structure does not guide sentence interpretation after the sentence is fully parsed. When reading familiar sentences, readers make rhythmic adjustments and often produce prosodic phrasing that informs their interpretation of the sentence. These findings suggest that prosodic phrasing of read speech only informs the message if the sentence had previously been fully parsed.
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Notes
- 1.
Japanese orthography consists of logographic (Chinese Kanji) and syllabic (Kana/Katakana) characters.
- 2.
Many of the silent reading studies focused on local boundary strength (presence or absence of a boundary at N2) or assumed that a prosodic boundary would be projected either after N1 or after N2. Nevertheless, the results are consistent with an approach focusing on relative boundary strength since the presence of a boundary after N2 heightens the likelihood of it being the stronger of the relevant boundaries.
- 3.
In a production study that used the same task as Experiment 1, Bergmann, Armstrong, and Maday (2008) compared the production of sentences like Someone shot the servant of the actress who was standing on the balcony in English and Spanish. They coded prosodic boundary strength and prosodic boundary type at the verb, N1 and N2. They found that boundary strength in English different at the two sentence locations N1 and N2 with more IP boundaries at N2 than N1. Boundary type at N1 and N2, on the other hand, were comparable: Almost all ip boundaries at N1 and N2 had a H- phrase accent and over 80% of IP boundaries had the patterns H-L% (floor-holding pattern) or L-H% (continuation rise). These boundary types all convey that the speaker is not done speaking (cf. Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990). Prosodic boundaries at the end of the sentence were overwhelmingly L-L%, indicating finality. The boundaries at N1 and N2 thus seem to reflect the fact that the sentence is not over. We therefore focus on boundary strength in our analysis.
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Foltz, A., Maday, K., Ito, K. (2011). Order Effects in Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Boundaries. In: Frota, S., Elordieta, G., Prieto, P. (eds) Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0137-3_3
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