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ERIC Number: EJ907857
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Dec
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0023-8309
EISSN: N/A
Syntactic Structure Guides Prosody in Temporarily Ambiguous Sentences
Anderson, Catherine; Carlson, Katy
Language and Speech, v53 n4 p472-493 Dec 2010
A pair of speaking and listening studies investigated the prosody of sentences with temporary Object/Clause and Late/Early Closure ambiguities. Speakers reliably produced prosodic cues that allowed listeners to disambiguate Late/Early Closure sentences, but only infrequently produced prosody that disambiguated Object/Clause sentences, as shown by the results of listening studies. The two continuations for Object/Clause sentences were not pronounced with identical prosody, but the differences in their productions were not helpful to listeners. Speakers' different performance on the two sentence types is traced to their different syntactic structures. These results illustrate the importance of the syntax-prosody mapping in production and test the prosodic predictions of syntax-prosody models like that of Watson and Gibson (2004). (Contains 8 figures and 5 tables.)
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A