Effects of prosody and transitivity biases in auditory syntactic ambiguity resolution

DeDe, Gayle and Caplan, David and Waters, Gloria (2006) Effects of prosody and transitivity biases in auditory syntactic ambiguity resolution. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Studies of written sentence processing have found that, in the absence of commas, lexical information such as verb subcategorization biases and plausibility influence the interpretation of sentences with early closure (EC) ambiguities. In auditory sentence processing, prosody functions similarly to punctuation. The present study used self-paced listening to investigate whether prosody interacted with lexical factors to produce garden path effects similar to those observed in reading studies in a group of twenty-one college students. The results suggested that prosody interacts with transitivity during resolution of EC ambiguities, and that prosodic cues function similarly to commas in disambiguation of this structure.

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