Phrasing effects in comprehending PP constructions.
The role of prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was investigated by means of three different tasks, namely auditory word monitoring (Experiment 1), self-paced reading (Experiment 2) and cross-modal comparison (Experiment 3). In all three experiments a critical prosodic unit or frame comprising a determiner, a noun and a Prepositional Phrase (PP) was preceded or surrounded by two context prosodic units (frames) whose length was varied. The participants' tendency to interpret the critical sequence as forming a single syntactic constituent (noun-complement interpretation of the PP) as opposed to two distinct syntactic constituents (verb-complement interpretation of the PP) was found to depend on the relative length of the critical and context prosodic units (frames). As a whole these results are consistent with the notion that phrasing effects occur in a retroactive way, after part of the utterance has been processed.
Pynte
Joel
J
CNRS and Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France. pynte@up.univ-aix.fr
D032882:Comprehension; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010820:Physicians; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary