The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1976 · 203 citations · 0 references
Syntactic ParsingSyntactic StructurePhonologyLanguage ProcessingSyntaxAmbiguous BoundariesExperimental PragmaticSpeech ProsodyComputational LinguisticsProsody (Film Studies)GrammarCorpus AnalysisLanguage StudiesHealth SciencesCognitive ScienceAmbiguous SentencesSpeech ProductionProsody (Linguistics)Ambiguous ConstituentsPragmaticsSpeech CommunicationSpeech PerceptionLinguistics
Syntactically ambiguous sentences can be interpreted via two distinct bracketings, while some ambiguous sentences share a common bracketing structure. The study examined whether listeners use prosodic duration to resolve such ambiguities. Participants listened to sentences and chose one of two possible meanings. Durational cues reliably disambiguated only those sentences with two distinct bracketings, suggesting that lengthening the interstress interval across a major syntactic boundary makes listeners perceive the boundary. Subject Classification: [43]70.30, [43]70.70.
The present study investigated whether listeners use the prosodic variable, duration, to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences. Some of the sentences’ meanings could be represented by two distinct syntactic bracketings, e.g., ’’The hostess [[greeted] [the girl] [with a smile].’’ and ’’ The hostess [greeted] [[the girl] [with a smile.]]. The hostess [greeted] [[the girl] [with a smile.]].’’ Other sentences, while ambiguous, had a common syntactic bracketing, e.g., ’’[German teachers] visit Greensboro.’’ In this experiment the duration of words corresponding to ambiguous constituents of the sentences or containing ambiguous boundaries of the constituents was varied systematically. Subjects listened to the sentences and selected one of the two meanings. The results indicated that only sentences in which the two meanings were represented by two distinct syntactic bracketings were reliably disambiguated by durational cues. It is suggested that when the interstress interval spanning a major syntactic boundary is increased, listeners perceive the boundary’s presence. Subject Classification: [43]70.30, [43]70.70.