THE INFLUENCE OF SPEECH PROSODY ON SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION: A SENTENCE-PROCESSING STUDY

The present paper aims to analyze the role of prosody in the resolution of global ambiguity in sentences of the type NP1 - V - NP2 - Adverb of place - Adverb of intensity ( very) - Attribute (The guitarist received the drummer in the room very drugged), in Brazilian Portuguese. We consider the hypothesis that prosodic cues, such as stress and pause, aid in the process of disambiguation, both in isolation and in conjunction. The experimental paradigm of the present study used an off-line method of linguistic processing through a questionnaire whose response options were presented on a Likert scale. The results presented revealed predominance of non-local apposition judgments in all analyzed conditions. However, the choice of assigning the adjective to the first nominal phrase increased, in a statistically significant way, in the conditions in which there was prosodic manipulation for that purpose, showing evidence for confirmation of our hypothesis.