EXPLORING THE USE OF PROSODY DURING LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION USING THE AUDITORY MOVING WINDOW TECHNIQUE

Researchers in psycholinguistics have speculated about the possible ro le of prosody in resolving syntactic ambiguities, We argue in this pap er that the issue is complicated by the following considerations: firs t, prosody may be even more effective at conveying semantic informatio n than syntactic structure yet the question how prosody signals meanin g is essentially unstudied. Second, the one-to-many relation between s yntactic and prosodic structure leads to a great deal of variability a cross-speakers and contexts in the way a given sentence will be produc ed. The parser must somehow deal with this variability. Third, resolut ion of architectural debates in the parsing literature requires the us e of sensitive, online techniques for measuring processing load during comprehension. In the auditory domain, no optimal technique is presen tly available. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a technique we introduced in previous work, which is art analogue of the visual mo ving window. We present the results of an experiment demonstrating tha t the technique preserves some aspects of the prosody of a spoken sent ence but disrupts others, and we discuss ways of dealing with this pro blem. We conclude that the technique is useful for studying language p rocessing, including the use of prosody during parsing. However, we al so argue that researchers should study not just the role of prosody in parsing, but also its role in establishing sentence meaning.