Prosody and the processing of filler-gap sentences.
This study was designed to explore the effects of linguistic prosody on the processing of "filler-gap" sentences. We designed two experiments to determine first whether the sentence processor uses information contained in the prosodic contour of an utterance during on-line processing, and second the form that information may take. In Experiment 1, we found that prosody apparently influences when listeners posit gaps on-line. In Experiment 2, we obtained acoustic evidence that gaps are represented in the prosodic contour of an utterance. The results of this study support a view in which prosody contributes very early to on-line structure building mechanisms during sentence processing.
Nagel
H N
HN
Center for Human Information Processing, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla.
Shapiro
L P
LP
Nawy
R
R
D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010898:Pitch Perception; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement