Order Effects in Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Boundaries

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 brotherN1 of the bridegroomN2 who swimsRC 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.