TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of pitch accents in attachment ambiguity resolution
AU - Lee, Eun Kyung
AU - Watson, Duane G.
N1 - Correspondence should be addressed to Eun-Kyung Lee, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 707 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: [email protected] We would like to thank Keturah Bixby and Susan Smith for their assistance with recording stimuli and running participants. This project was supported by Grant Number R01DC008774 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders or the National Institutes of Health.
PY - 2011/2
Y1 - 2011/2
N2 - Previous work has found that listeners prefer to attach ambiguous syntactic constituents to nouns produced with a pitch accent (Schafer, Carter, Clifton, & Frazier, 1996). This study examines what factors underlie previously established accent attachment effects by testing whether these effects are driven by a preference to attach syntactic constituents to new or important information (the Syntax Hypothesis) or whether there is a bias to respond to postsentence probe questions with an accented word (the Salience Hypothesis). One of the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis is that selection of accentedwords should be greater when a sentence is complex and processing resources are limited. The results from the experiments presented here show that the probability of listeners' selecting accentedwords when asked about the interpretation of a relative clause varies with sentence type: listeners selected accented words more frequently in long sentences than in short sentences, consistent with the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis. Furthermore, Experiment 4 demonstrates that listeners are more likely to respond to postsentence questions with accented words than with nonaccented words, even when no ambiguity is present, and even when the response results in an incorrect answer. These findings suggest that accent-driven attachment effects found in earlier studies reflect a postsentence selection process rather than a syntactic processing mechanism.
AB - Previous work has found that listeners prefer to attach ambiguous syntactic constituents to nouns produced with a pitch accent (Schafer, Carter, Clifton, & Frazier, 1996). This study examines what factors underlie previously established accent attachment effects by testing whether these effects are driven by a preference to attach syntactic constituents to new or important information (the Syntax Hypothesis) or whether there is a bias to respond to postsentence probe questions with an accented word (the Salience Hypothesis). One of the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis is that selection of accentedwords should be greater when a sentence is complex and processing resources are limited. The results from the experiments presented here show that the probability of listeners' selecting accentedwords when asked about the interpretation of a relative clause varies with sentence type: listeners selected accented words more frequently in long sentences than in short sentences, consistent with the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis. Furthermore, Experiment 4 demonstrates that listeners are more likely to respond to postsentence questions with accented words than with nonaccented words, even when no ambiguity is present, and even when the response results in an incorrect answer. These findings suggest that accent-driven attachment effects found in earlier studies reflect a postsentence selection process rather than a syntactic processing mechanism.
KW - Pitch accents
KW - Prosody
KW - Relative clauses
KW - Syntactic processing
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U2 - 10.1080/01690965.2010.491650
DO - 10.1080/01690965.2010.491650
M3 - Article
C2 - 22287815
AN - SCOPUS:78751679761
SN - 0169-0965
VL - 26
SP - 262
EP - 297
JO - Language and Cognitive Processes
JF - Language and Cognitive Processes
IS - 2
ER -