PROSODIC FORM AND PARSING COMMITMENTS

This paper enamines the question of whether there ave effects of proso dy on the syntactic parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences contain ing complement verbs. It reports the results of five experiments emplo ying cross-modal response tasks where the visually presented target we ld was either an 'appropriate' or an 'inappropriate' continuation in t erms of the prosodic form of the preceeding auditory sentence fragment . Two experiments employing cross-modal naming only showed indications of sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness manipulations when co upled with a simultaneous appropriateness judgment task. In contrast, the experiments employing cross-modal lexical decision showed greater sensitivity to syntactic and appropriateness effects. However, while t he results from these studies replicated our earlier auditory parsing results and provided support for the suggestion that there are differe nces in visual and auditory parsing processes and for a 'constituent-b ased,' 'minimal commitment' type auditory parser, none of the studies demonstrated an effect of prosodic form on the parsing process.