PROSODIC INFLUENCES ON THE RESOLUTION OF TEMPORARY AMBIGUITY DURING ONLINE SENTENCE PROCESSING

We present three experiments designed to investigate the role of proso dy during sentence processing. The first investigated the question of whether an utterance's prosodic contour influences its comprehension o n-line. We spliced the beginning and end portions of direct object and embedded clause sentences and observed the consequent effects on comp rehension using a dual-task procedure to measure processing load. Our second experiment sought to determine whether the constituent structur e of these sentences could be reliably predicted using prosodic inform ation. We found that the duration and F-0 contour associated with the main-clause verb and the following NP reliably distinguished between t he direct object and embedded clause constructions. In the final exper iment, we manipulated the duration of the main-clause verb and found t hat subjects used this information to guide their initial pause during on-line sentence comprehension. The need for a model of sentence proc essing that addresses the use of prosodic information is discussed.