Prosodic form and parsing commitments

Timing of Syntactic and Rhythmic Effects on Ambiguity Resolution in Turkish: A Phoneme Restoration Study

It has been shown that speakers use prosodic cues to disambiguate the syntactic structure of a sentence and listeners are sensitive to such cues. But the distribution of prosodic boundaries has been reported to depend on the lengths of constituents as well as the syntactic structure of utterances. Hence, it is possible that listeners are sensitive to these alternative reasons (i.e., syntactic or length-related) for why a speaker might introduce a prosodic break (Clifton, Carlson, & Frazier, 2006). The present study of Turkish employs a phoneme restoration paradigm to investigate more closely the time-course of three factors (prosodic cues, syntactic Late Closure, and phrase length effects) in the comprehension of a late/early closure ambiguity. The results confirm a significant role of prosody in restoring missing disambiguating phonemes; listeners tended to maintain an analysis that was syntactically or prosodically favored on-line. Notably, they did not generally revise that decision in face of the rhythmic factor of phrase lengths. This may be because length contrasts become fully apparent only later in a sentence. This is supported by the fact that when tested post-sententially in a previous study of Turkish (Deniz & Fodor, 2017), it was found that phrase lengths as well as prosodic and syntactic effects did influence parsing decisions, indicating that all three sources of guidance were at work. By comparing these two studies, with their different methodologies applied to the same materials, we document here the novel finding that rhythmic phrase length effects are indeed delayed, as previously contemplated by Clifton et al.

Serial and parallel processes in eye movement control: current controversies and future directions

In this editorial for the special issue on serial and parallel processing in reading we explore the background to the current debate concerning whether the word recognition processes in reading are strictly serial-sequential or take place in an overlapping parallel fashion. We consider the history of the controversy and some of the underlying assumptions, together with an analysis of the types of evidence and arguments that have been adduced to both sides of the debate, concluding that both accounts necessarily presuppose some weakening of, or elasticity in, the eye-mind assumption. We then consider future directions, both for reading research and for scene viewing, and wrap up the editorial with a brief overview of the following articles and their conclusions.

Speech rhythm facilitates syntactic ambiguity resolution: ERP evidence

In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a constant metric pattern of three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones that created rhythmic groups of constant size. Accuracy rates in a comprehension task revealed that participants understood rhythmically regular sentences better than rhythmically irregular ones. Furthermore, the mean amplitude of the P600 component was reduced in response to object-first sentences only when embedded in rhythmically regular but not rhythmically irregular context. This P600 reduction indicates facilitated processing of sentence structure possibly due to a decrease in processing costs for the less-preferred structure (object-first). Our data suggest an early and continuous use of rhythm by the syntactic parser and support language processing models assuming an interactive and incremental use of linguistic information during language processing.

Syntactic structure guides prosody in temporarily ambiguous sentences

A pair of speaking and listening studies investigated the prosody of sentences with temporary Object/Clause and Late/Early Closure ambiguities. Speakers reliably produced prosodic cues that allowed listeners to disambiguate Late/Early Closure sentences, but only infrequently produced prosody that disambiguated Object/Clause sentences, as shown by the results of listening studies.The two continuations for Object/Clause sentences were not pronounced with identical prosody, but the differences in their productions were not helpful to listeners. Speakers' different performance on the two sentence types is traced to their different syntactic structures. These results illustrate the importance of the syntax-prosody mapping in production and test the prosodic predictions of syntax-prosody models like that ofWatson and Gibson (2004).

Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody: A review

Research on prosody has recently become an important focus in various disciplines, including Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science. This article reviews recent research advances on two key issues: prosodic phrasing and prosodic prominence. Both aspects of prosody are influenced by linguistic factors such as syntactic constituent structure, semantic relations, phonological rhythm, pragmatic considerations, and also by processing factors such as the length, complexity or predictability of linguistic material. Our review summarizes recent insights into the production and perception of these two components of prosody and their grammatical underpinnings. While this review only covers a subset of a broader set of research topics on prosody in cognitive science, they are representative of a tendency in the field toward a more interdisciplinary approach.

It's Early: Event-related Potential Evidence for Initial Interaction of Syntax and Prosody in Speech Comprehension

Psycholinguistic theories assume an interaction between prosody and syntax during language processing. Based on studies using mostly off-line methods, it is unclear whether an interaction occurs at later or initial processing stages. Using event-related potentials, the present study provides neurophysiological evidence for a prosody and syntax interaction in initial processing. The sentence material contained mere prosodic and syntactic as well as combined prosodic-syntactic violations. For the syntax violation, the critical word appeared after a preposition. The suffix of the critical word either indicated a noun fulfilling the syntactic requirements of the preceding preposition or a verb causing a word category violation. For the prosodic manipulation, congruent critical words were normally intonated (signaling sentence continuation) while prosodically incongruent critical words signaled sentence end. For the mere prosodic incongruity, a broadly distributed negativity was observed at the critical word-stem (300–500 msec aligned to word onset). In response to a mere syntactic error, a left temporal negativity was elicited in an early time window (200–400 msec aligned to suffix onset), taken to reflect initial phrase structure building processes. In contrast, in response to the combined prosodic-syntactic violation, an early temporal negativity showed up bilaterally at the suffix in the same time window. Our interpretation is that the process of initial structure building as reflected in the early left anterior negativity recruits additional right hemispheric neural resources when the critical word contains both syntactic and prosodic violations. This suggests the immediate influence of phrasal prosody during the initial parsing stage in speech processing.

Influence of Prosodic Information on the Processing of Split Particles: ERP Evidence from Spoken German

Spoken language comprehension involves the use of different sources of linguistic information such as prosodic, syntactic, lexical, and semantic information. The question, however, of “when” and “how” these sources of information are exploited by the language processing system still remains unanswered. In the present study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the interaction between prosodic, syntactic, and lexical information during the processing of spoken German sentences. The sentence structure was manipulated by positioning a split particle at the end of the sentences after the occurrence of inflected verb whose lexical entry does not contain a split particle (e.g., *Sie alarmierte den Detektiv an [*She alerted at the detective]) [According to linguistic convention, incorrect sentences are marked by an asterisk.]. The prosodic contour of the verb stems was manipulated such that it marked either the presence of a split particle at a later position in the sentence or not. Participants performed an off-line probe-detection task. ERP data indicate that prosodic information of German-inflected verb stems is consulted on-line by the language processing system (“parser”) in order to “predict” the presence of a split particle at a later position in the sentence. An N400 effect was observed for the processing of split particles following verb stems which do not take a particle. However, this effect was only observed when the prosody of the verb stem did signal the presence of a split particle. We argue that the N400 component reflects the high costs associated with the lexical search that the language processing system has to perform when confronted with nonexisting words such as these resulting from the combination of the split particle and the verb stem in the present study. Furthermore, as a general reflection of prosodic processes, a Closure Positive Shift (CPS) was found at intonational phrase boundaries. In sum, the present findings provide strong evidence that prosodic information is a good “predictor” of upcoming information during the auditory processing of German sentences.

Sensitivity to prosodic structure in left- and right-hemisphere-damaged individuals

An experiment was conducted in order to determine whether left- (LHD) and right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients exhibit sensitivity to prosodic information that is used in syntactic disambiguation. Following the work of, a cross-modal lexical decision task was performed by LHD and RHD subjects, as well as by adults without brain pathology (NC). Subjects listened to sentences with attachment ambiguities with either congruent or incongruent prosody, while performing a visual lexical decision task. Results showed that each of the unilaterally damaged populations differed from each other, as well as from the NCs in terms of sensitivity regarding prosodic cues. Specifically, the RHD group was insensitive to sentence prosody as a whole. This was in contrast to the LHD patients, who responded to the prosodic manipulation, but in the unexpected direction. Results are discussed in terms of current hypotheses regarding the hemispheric lateralization of prosodic cues.

Electrophysiological correlates of prosody and punctuation

Psycholinguistic models of sentence parsing are primarily based on reading rather than auditory processing data. Moreover, both prosodic information and its potential orthographic equivalent, i.e., punctuation, have been largely ignored until recently. The unavailability of experimental online methods is one likely reason for this neglect. Here I give an overview of six event-related brain potential (ERP) studies demonstrating that the processing of both prosodic boundaries in natural speech and commas during silent reading can determine syntax parsing immediately. In ERPs, speech boundaries and commas reliably elicit a similar online brain response, termed the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). This finding points to a common mechanism, suggesting that commas serve as visual triggers for covert phonological phrasing. Alternative CPS accounts are tested and the relationship between the CPS and other ERP components, including the P600/SPS, is addressed.

The extraction of structure during reading: evidence from reading prosody

According to the structural approach to reading, the extraction of structure precedes the analysis of meaning and paves the way for it. In this study, reading prosody was used to examine this proposition. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that reading prosody produced on line reflects the early extraction of structure. In Experiment 1, readers were successful in assigning natural prosody to unfamiliar text immediately upon its reading. Experiment 2 showed that the prosodic patterns applied are tuned to the structure of the sentence and are largely indifferent to the content of the sentence or to its semantic coherence. The results join with other findings in speech production and comprehension in supporting the precedence of structure to meaning in reading.

Prosodic facilitation in the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in subjects with left and right hemisphere damage

The purpose of this study was to determine if prosody facilitates the comprehension of sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities in control, and left (LHD) and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) subjects. To test for effects of prosodic facilitation, sentences were created where prosodic boundaries coincided with (cooperating), were absent (baseline), or conflicted (conflicting) with syntactic boundaries in three response times (RTs) experiments. Despite differences in overall RTs and response accuracy for each group, all three groups responded faster and more accurately to sentences in the cooperating than in the baseline and conflicting conditions across experiments, indicating that prosody facilitates syntactic parsing in brain-damaged subjects just as it does with normal control subjects. Results are discussed in relation to psycholinguistic theories of syntactic parsing and neurolinguistic theories of hemispheric specialization in processing the acoustic properties of prosodic structures.

Prosody and parsing in coordination structures

The effect of prosodic boundary cues on the off-line disambiguation and on-line parsing of coordination structures was examined. It was found that relative clauses were attached to coordinated object noun phrases in preference to second conjuncts in sentences like: The lawyer greeted the powerful barrister and the wise judge who was/were walking to the courtroom. Naive speakers signalled the syntactic contrast between the two structures by a prosodic break between the conjuncts when the relative clause was attached to the second conjunct. Listeners were able to use this prosodic information in both off-line syntactic disambiguation and on-line syntactic parsing. The findings are compatible with a model in which prosody has a strong immediate effect on parsing. It is argued that the current experimental design has avoided confounds present in earlier studies on the on-line integration of prosodic and syntactic information.

Influence of prosodic boundaries on comprehension of spoken English sentences

Three experiments investigated the role of prosody in the comprehension of auditory sentences. In Exp. 1 an analysis of three novice talkers and one expert talker verified the production parameters of one type of syntactic ambiguity and showed that pitch cues were more prominent than duration cues. In Exp. 2, 16 listeners used prosodic information to make consistent decisions reliably about phrase boundaries. In Exp. 3, 40 participants listened to sentences in which prosody was inconsistent with later morphosyntactic information, indicated their understanding, and then judged whether a visual target was related to the meaning of the sentence. Inconsistent prosody slowed comprehension and contributed to slower, less accurate judgments of sentence meaning. This suggests that prosodic information contributes to the perception of spoken language and can affect comprehension even when the syntactic structure indicated by prosody is contradicted by subsequent morphosyntactic information.

Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: a literature review

Research on the exploitation of prosodic information in the comprehension of spoken language is reviewed. The research falls into three main areas: the use of prosody in the recognition of spoken words, in which most attention has been paid to the question of whether the prosodic structure of a word plays a role in initial activation of stored lexical representations; the use of prosody in the computation of syntactic structure, in which the resolution of global and local ambiguities has formed the central focus; and the role of prosody in the processing of discourse structure, in which there has been a preponderance of work on the contribution of accentuation and deaccentuation to integration of concepts with an existing discourse model. The review reveals that in each area progress has been made towards new conceptions of prosody's role in processing, and in particular this has involved abandonment of previously held deterministic views of the relationship between prosodic structure and other aspects of linguistic structure.