The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation

TLDR

Prosodic and syntactic structures differ yet are interrelated. The study seeks to identify when and how prosody and syntax correspond to enhance speech synthesis, disambiguation, and understanding. Across 35 phonetically similar sentence pairs, prosody disambiguated some but not all structural contrasts, mainly via boundary phenomena and occasionally prominence, with phonetic analysis underscoring the role of both absolute and relative measures.

Abstract

Prosodic structure and syntactic structure are not identical; neither are they unrelated. Knowing when and how the two correspond could yield better quality speech synthesis, could aid in the disambiguation of competing syntactic hypotheses in speech understanding, and could lead to a more comprehensive view of human speech processing. In a set of experiments involving 35 pairs of phonetically similar sentences representing seven types of structural contrasts, the perceptual evidence shows that some, but not all, of the pairs can be disambiguated on the basis of prosodic differences. The phonological evidence relates the disambiguation primarily to boundary phenomena, although prominences sometimes play a role. Finally, phonetic analyses describing the attributes of these phonological markers indicate the importance of both absolute and relative measures.