THE INFLUENCE OF PROSODIC STRUCTURE ON THE RESOLUTION OF TEMPORARY SYNTACTIC CLOSURE AMBIGUITIES

This paper investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the pro cess of sentence comprehension, with a specific focus on the relative contributions of syntactic and prosodic information to the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. We argue that prosodic str ucture provides an initial memory representation for spoken sentences, and that information from this prosodic representation is available t o inform syntactic parsing decisions. This view makes three prediction s for the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity: 1. When prosodi c and syntactic boundaries coincide, syntactic processing should be fa cilitated. 2. When prosodic boundaries are placed at misleading points in syntactic structure, syntactic processing should show interference effects. 3. The processing difficulties that have been reliably demon strated in reading experiments for syntactically complex sentences sho uld disappear when those sentences are presented with a felicitous pro sodic structure in listening experiments. These predictions were confi rmed by series of experiments measuring end-of-sentence comprehension time and cross-modal naming time for sentences with temporary syntacti c closure ambiguities. Sentences with coinciding or conflicting prosod ic and syntactic boundaries were compared to a prosodic baseline condi tion.