THE INTERPRETATION OF PROSODIC PATTERNS AT POINTS OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE AMBIGUITY - EVIDENCE FOR CUE TRADING RELATIONS

Two experiments explore listener's use of sentence prosody to identify syntactic structure. Beginning portions of synthesized sentences having a direct object-sentence complement ambiguity were assigned duration and pitch patterns more or less typical for a given sentence type. Listeners judged which type of complete sentence an item had been excised from. Experiment 1 shows that prosody, available at an early point in a sentence, influences listeners' judgments. Therefore it is reasonable to propose that listeners use prosodic information to predict eventual sentence syntactic structure during online sentence processing. Experiment 2 closely examines the mechanism by which prosody functions as a cue to syntactic structure. A close fit by the fuzzy propositional model (G. C. Oden & D. W. Massaro, 1978, Psychological Review85, No. 3, 172-191) demonstrates that the identification of syntactic structure based on acoustic-prosodic cues is characterized by the same type of cue trading relations that characterize identification of phonemes based on acousticphonetic cues. © 1991.