Phrasal prosody disambiguates syntax (original) (raw)

2007, Language and Cognitive Processes

https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960701205286

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Abstract

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AI

The research investigates the role of phrasal prosody in disambiguating syntactic structures, focusing on the effects of both intonational phrase boundaries and phonological phrase boundaries. Through a series of experiments, it was found that phonological phrase boundaries influence syntactic ambiguity resolution in spoken sentences, suggesting that these prosodic cues are produced by both expert and naïve speakers, enhancing syntactic analysis during language acquisition.

The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation

The Journal of the Acoustical …, 1991

Prosodic structure and syntactic structure are not identical; neither are they unrelated. Knowing when and how the two eorrespoud could yield better quality speech synthesis, could aid in the disambiguation of com-peting syntactic hypotheses in speech understanding, and could ...

The Prosodic Resolution of Syntactic/Semantic Ambiguity: An Exemplar-based Account

Language Research, 2017

This study tests the hypothesis that the ambiguity of a null argument construction in Korean like Lwummeituka mwusewun ka poayo (The roommate must be scared/scary) can be prosodically resolved. The null argument construction is tested with two-place psychological predicates such as mwusewun (scared/scary) and kwichanun (bothered/bothersome). A naturalness rating experiment shows the following: (1) when the NP Lwummeituka is the experiencer of the psychological predicate scare and the sentence means 'The roommate must be scared,' both an Accentual Phrase (AP) boundary and an Intonational Phrase (IP) boundary are equally accepted between the NP and the VP; (2) when the NP is the stimulus (The roommate must be scary), only an AP boundary is perceived natural. Reaction time and comprehension question accuracy data further display the role played by prosody in ambiguity resolution. The results are discussed within the exemplar framework.

Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: For the speaker or for the addressee?

Cognitive Psychology, 2005

Evidence has been mixed on whether speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities. And when speakers do produce such cues, it is unclear whether they do so ''for'' their addressees (the audience design hypothesis) or ''for'' themselves, as a by-product of planning and articulating utterances. Three experiments addressed these issues. In Experiments 1 and 3, speakers followed pictorial guides to spontaneously instruct addressees to move objects. Critical instructions (e.g., ''Put the dog in the basket on the star'') were syntactically ambiguous, and the referential situation supported either one or both interpretations. Speakers reliably produced disambiguating cues to syntactic ambiguity whether the situation was ambiguous or not. However, Experiment 2 suggested that most speakers were not yet aware of whether the situation was ambiguous by the time they began to speak, and so adapting to addresseesÕ particular needs may not have been feasible in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 examined individual speakersÕ awareness of situational ambiguity and the extent to which they signaled structure, with or without addressees present. Speakers tended to produce prosodic cues to syntactic boundaries regardless of their addresseesÕ needs in particular situations. Such cues did prove helpful to addressees, who correctly interpreted speak-ersÕ instructions virtually all the time. In fact, even when speakers produced syntactically ambiguous utterances in situations that supported both interpretations, eye-tracking data

Cross-linguistic differences in prosodic cues to syntactic disambiguation in German and English

Applied Psycholinguistics, 2012

ABSTRACTThis study examined whether late-learning English–German second language (L2) learners and late-learning German–English L2 learners use prosodic cues to disambiguate temporarily ambiguous first language and L2 sentences during speech production. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that English–German L2 learners and German–English L2 learners used a pitch rise and pitch accent to disambiguate PP-attachment sentences in German. However, the same participants, as well as monolingual English speakers, only used pitch accent to disambiguate similar English sentences. Taken together, these results indicate the L2 learners used prosody to disambiguate sentences in both of their languages and did not fully transfer cues to disambiguation from their first language to their L2. The results have implications for the acquisition of L2 prosody and the interaction between prosody and meaning in L2 production.

Situationally independent prosodic phrasing

2011

A series of speech production and categorization experiments demonstrates that naïve speakers and listeners reliably use correspondences between prosodic phrasing and syntactic constituent structure to resolve standing and temporary ambiguity. Materials obtained from a co-operative gameboard task show that prosodic phrasing effects (e.g., the location of the strongest break in an utterance) are independent of discourse factors that might be expected to influence the impact of syntactic ambiguity, including the availability of visual referents for the meanings of ambiguous utterances and the use of utterances as instructions versus confirmations of instructions. These effects hold across two dialects of English, spoken in the American Midwest, and New Zealand. Results from PP-attachment and verb transitivity ambiguities indicate clearly that the production of prosody-syntax correspondences is not conditional upon situational disambiguation of syntactic structure, but is rather more directly tied to grammatical constraints on the production of prosodic and syntactic form. Differences between our results and those reported elsewhere are best explained in terms of differences in task demands.

The role of prosody in disambiguating potentially ambiguous utterances in English and Italian

1997

We investigate the role that intonation plays in disambiguating potentially ambiguous utterances in English and Italian, to see a) whether speakers employ intonational means to disambiguate these utterances, and b) whether speakers of the two languages employed consistently different intonational strategies in this disambiguation. We find that, while some semantic phenomena are consistently disambiguated by both sets of speakers, the syntactic phenomena tested are not. We suggest a possible explanation for this disparity.

Intonational Disambiguation in Sentence Production and Comprehension

2000

Speakers' prosodic marking of syntactic constituency is often measured in sentence reading tasks that lack realistic situational constraints on speaking. Results from such studies can be criticized because the pragmatic goals of readers differ dramatically from those of speakers in typical conversation. On the other hand, recordings of unscripted speech do not readily yield the carefully controlled contrasts required for many research purposes. Our research employs a cooperative game task, in which two speakers use utterances from a predetermined set to negotiate moves around gameboards. Results from a set of early versus late closure ambiguities suggest that speakers signal this syntactic difference with prosody even when the utterance context fully disambiguates the structure. Phonetic and phonological analyses show reliable prosodic disambiguation in speakers' productions; results of a comprehension task indicate that listeners can successfully use prosodic cues to categorize syntactically ambiguous fragments as portions of early or late closure utterances. for assistance with running subjects and measuring data.

An Extra Cue Is Beneficial for Native Speakers but Can Be Disruptive for Second Language Learners: Integration of Prosody and Visual Context in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

It has long been debated whether non-native speakers can process sentences in the same way as native speakers do or they suffer from certain qualitative deficit in their ability of language comprehension. The current study examined the influence of prosodic and visual information in processing sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase ("Put the cake on the plate in the basket") with native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Specifically, we investigated (1) whether native speakers assign different pragmatic functions to the same prosodic cues used in different contexts and (2) whether L2 learners can reach the correct analysis by integrating prosodic cues with syntax with reference to the visually presented contextual information. The results from native speakers showed that contrastive accents helped to resolve the referential ambiguity when a contrastive pair was present in visual scenes. However, without a contrastive pair in the visual scene, native speakers were slower to reach the correct analysis with the contrastive accent, which supports the view that the pragmatic function of intonation categories are highly context dependent. The results from L2 learners showed that visually presented context alone helped L2 learners to reach the correct analysis. However, L2 learners were unable to assign contrastive meaning to the prosodic cues when there were two potential referents in the visual scene. The results suggest that L2 learners are not capable of integrating multiple sources of information in an interactive manner during real-time language comprehension.

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References (36)

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  31. Downloaded By: [Millotte, Séverine] At: 20:10 11 September 2007 TABLE (Continued)
  32. Manger cette tartelette COMPLETE ne me va pas car je n'ai plus faim. 12 Ces petites lumie `res DIFFUSENT une agre ´able sensation de calme. 12 Ces petites lumie `res DIFFUSES ne fatiguent pas les yeux.
  33. 13 Ce petit clown DISTRAIT les enfants malades dans les ho ˆpitaux. 13 Ce petit clown DISTRAIT n'a pas vu qu'il avait oublie ´son nez rouge. 14 Ce pre ´sident ILLUSTRE la re ´ussite sociale et professionnelle. 14 Ce pre ´sident ILLUSTRE lit tre `s peu de romans contemporains. 15 Cette belle femme CAPTIVE l'attention du public. 15 Cette belle femme CAPTIVE craint pour sa vie.
  34. J'ai appris que les adolescents MUAIENT de plus en plus pre ´cocement.
  35. J'ai appris que les adolescents MUETS de ´siraient souvent devenir interpre `tes en langue des signes.
  36. 17 Je trouve que mes amies PERCENT rapidement dans le milieu du mannequinat. 17 Je trouve que mes amies PERSES rec ¸oivent une e ´ducation trop stricte. 'art contemporain. 22 Il a peur que ses amis COULENT pendant la tempe ˆte. 22 Il a peur que ses amis COOL puissent ga ˆcher son repas d'affaires.

Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1996

Although previous research has shown that listeners can use prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguities in spoken sentences, it is not clear whether naive, untrained speakers in experimental situations ordinarily produce the prosodic cues necessary for disambiguating such sentences. In a series of experiments, the authors found that neither professional nor untrained speakers consistently produced such prosodic cues when simply reading ambiguous sentences in a disambiguating discourse context. Speakers who were aware of the ambiguities and were told to intentionally pronounce the sentences with one meaning or the other, however, did produce sufficient prosodic cues for listeners to identify the intended meanings.

The effect of interpretation bias on the production of disambiguating prosody

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013

Syntactically ambiguous sentences are frequently strongly biased toward one meaning over another [see, e.g., Tanenhaus and Trueswell (1995)]. This interpretation bias influences listeners’ use of disambiguating prosody [Wales and Toner (1979)]. The current study investigated the effect on production. In experiment 1, the default interpretation of a heterogeneous set of 18 syntactically ambiguous sentences was investigated in 40 participants, who completed a question-and-answer task designed to identify intended meaning without making participants aware of potential ambiguity. Results were that 90% of the participants interpreted 11 of the sentences in just one way. There was a weaker interpretation bias for the remaining 7 sentences. In experiment 2, ten speakers were provided with and taught the alternate meanings of the 18 sentences from experiment 1, and then asked to disambiguate the meanings using prosody. Temporal and F0 measures indicated that while all speakers differentiate...

Assumed Meaning in the Production and Use of Disambiguating Prosody

spl.uoregon.edu

Conflicting results from psycholinguistic studies highlight variability in the realization and use of prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguity. The present study used default interpretations of a variety of structurally ambiguous sentences to understand the extent to ...

Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context

2003

In three experiments, a referential communication task was used to determine the conditions under which speakers produce and listeners use prosodic cues to distinguish alternative meanings of a syntactically ambiguous phrase. Analyses of the actions and utterances from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that Speakers chose to produce effective prosodic cues to disambiguation only when the referential scene provided support for both interpretations of the phrase. In Experiment 3, on-line measures of parsing commitments were obtained by recording the ListenerÕs eye movements to objects as the Speaker gave the instructions. Results supported the previous experiments but also showed that the SpeakerÕs prosody affected the ListenerÕs interpretation prior to the onset of the ambiguous phrase, thus demonstrating that prosodic cues not only influence initial parsing but can also be used to predict material which has yet to be spoken. The findings suggest that informative prosodic cues depend upon speakersÕ knowledge of the situation: speakers provide prosodic cues when needed; listeners use these prosodic cues when present.

Effects of prosodic boundaries on syntactic disambiguation*

Studia Linguistica, 2005

We present results of four experiments that examined the role of prosodic boundaries in sentence comprehension of syntactically ambiguous constructions in Korean. Considering the fact that there has been relatively less work on languages other than English on this topic, it will be interesting to see how the previous findings of prosodic effects on sentence comprehension will be manifested in this language. The main focus in this study was to see how prosodic structures interact with the head-final and pro-drop nature of this language. Results showed robust effects of prosodic boundaries on resolving syntactically ambiguous sentences, confirming previous findings on the role of prosody on sentence comprehension.

DISAMBIGUATION OF DITROPIC SENTENCES: ACOUSTIC AND PHONETIC CUES

In a previous study, we demonstrated that listeners were highly successful in identifying the intended meaning of spoken ditropic sentences (those which may carry either a literal or an idiomatic meaning) when speakers were instructed to convey the distinction. The present communication reports on acoustic and phonetic analyses carried out with the goal of identifying cues that distinguished the literal and idiomatic utterances. Certain prosodic differences were observed. Literal utterances were systematically longer than idioms. This was partly due to increased use of pauses, as well as to increased duration of major lexical items. Moreover, literal sentences were typically characterized by greater numbers of pitch contours (discernible rise-fall excursions of fundamental frequency) and open junctures than were idiomatic utterances. In addition to suprasegmental contrasts , articulatory distinctions-<,orresponding to lento-allegro phonological rules-were also observed. These distinctions directly reflect the structural differences intrinsic to the two types of utterances. A literal sentence is formulated by the organization of constituent words and phrases. Idioms, on the other hand, are holistic units, largely nontrans-parent to syntactic structure or the usual meaning of the lexical members.

Prosodic Parsing: The Role of Prosody in Sentence Comprehension

language processing and how prosody should be incorporated into models of sentence comprehension. It is argued that the processing system builds a prosodic representation in CHAPTER 1 PRELIMINARIES 1.1 Introduction It has long been recognized that prosodic structure is an important aspect of spoken language. Among other things, prosody can establish focus, distinguish given and new information, disambiguate certain structurally ambiguous strings, and convey emotions and attitudes. The sentences in (1.1) illustrate some of these effects of prosodic structure. (1.1) Prosodic Signals of Focus, Phrasing, and Attitude: a. This deli only sells strawberry gelatin salads. b. The old men and women stayed home. c. The South College ceilings are flawless! Sentence (1.1a) can differ in meaning depending on where accent, and therefore focus, falls in the VP. Sentence (1.1b) illustrates a form of structural ambiguity-whether old modifies just men or the conjoined NP men and women-that can be disambiguated through prosodic phrasing (Lehiste, 1973). Sentence (1.1c) would most likely be produced with strong prosodic markers of sarcasm by anyone familiar with the current South College ceilings.

Prosodic cue weighting in disambiguation: Case ambiguity in German

Previous work has shown that speakers and listeners efficiently exploit prosodic information to make the meaning of syntactically ambiguous sentences explicit. However, quantifiable phonetic properties of prosody in speech production (segmental duration, pause duration and fundamental frequency (f0)) stand in a complex relationship to the percept they invoke in the auditory domain. Not all measurable prosodic differences are actually used in sentence parsing. This study investigates the prosodic cues used by speakers to disambiguate a German case ambiguity in order to examine to which degree the individual cues contribute to disambiguation in perception. In a series of perception experiments sentences were consecutively manipulated to verify whether segmental duration, pause duration or pitch was one of the cues used by listeners in assigning a syntactic structure. Our findings show that durational cues are sufficient for listeners to identify the reading speakers assigned to the structures, whereas solely f0 information does not allow listeners to disambiguate the structures.

Phonological phrase boundaries constrain the online syntactic analysis of spoken sentences

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2008

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.

Prosodic Choice: Effects of Speaker Awareness and Referential Context

These experiments were designed to discover whether untrained speakers produce prosodic cues that are sufficient to allow listeners to interpret ambiguous PP-attachments. A referential communication task was used to elicit productions of ambiguous sentences and determine whether listeners could use pro-sodic cues to correctly interpret these ambiguities in context. In Experiment 1, the referential context supported both potential interpretations of the ambiguity. Acoustic analyses indicated that Speakers produced potentially informative prosodic cues. Listeners' responses to the ambiguous sentences strongly reflected the demonstration the Speaker had seen, indicating that they were able to use this information. However, post-experiment interviews revealed that Speakers were aware of the ambiguous situations. Experiment 2 manipulated Speaker awareness by altering the Speaker's referential context to support only the intended meaning, and by making the resolution of the ambiguity a between subjects variable. Although Listeners' contexts were unchanged from Experiment 1, Listeners now showed no sensitivity to the Speakers' intended meaning. Acoustic analysis indicated that the strong prosodic cues provided in Experiment 1 were absent in Experiment 2. The experiments suggest that informative prosodic cues depend upon speakers' knowledge of the situation: speakers provide prosodic cues when needed; listeners use these prosodic cues when present .

Cited by

Lexical Segmentation in Artificial Word Learning: The Effects of Converging Sublexical Cues

This study examines how French listeners segment and learn new words of artificial languages varying in the presence of different combinations of sublexical segmentation cues. The first experiment investigated the contribution of three different types of sublexical cues (acousticphonetic, phonological and prosodic cues) to word learning. The second experiment explored how participants specifically exploited sublexical prosodic cues. Whereas complementary cues signaling word-initial and word-final boundaries had synergistic effects on word learning in the first experiment, the two manipulated prosodic cues redundantly signaling word-final boundaries in the second experiment were rank-ordered with final pitch variations being more weighted than final lengthening. These results are discussed in light of the notions of cue type, cue position and cue efficiency.

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Developmental science, 2015

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme] [est très jolie] 'the small farm is very nice' vs. [la petite] [ferme la fenêtre] 'the little girl closes the window' - brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic informatio...

Prosody and Function Words Cue the Acquisition of Word Meanings in 18-Month-Old Infants

Psychological Science

Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical acquisition: phrasal prosody (speech melody) and function words, both of which are accessible early in life and correlate with syntactic structure in the world’s languages. We show that 18-month-old infants use prosody and function words to recover sentences’ syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meanings of novel words: Participants ( N = 48 in each of two experiments) interpreted a novel word as referring to either an object or an action, given its position within the prosodic-syntactic structure of sentences.

Chapter 2. Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition

Trends in Language Acquisition Research

This chapter will review empirical findings on the perception of phrasal prosody in very young infants, and how it develops in first language acquisition. The ability to process phrasal prosody impacts learning of important aspects of language, specifically word segmentation and syntactic parsing. We will see that infants are able to perceive crucial aspects of phrasal prosody before the end of their first year of life, and that a few months later they are able to exploit the prosodic structure of an utterance to constrain its syntactic analysis, and therefore, to infer the meaning of unknown words.