TY - JOUR
T1 - The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production
AU - Watson, Duane
AU - Gibson, Edward
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Duane Watson, Meliora 494, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. Email: dwatson@bcs.rochester.edu This project was supported by NSF grant BCS–0218605 ‘Intonational boundaries in sentence production and comprehension’. The first author was supported by NSF grant SES– 0208484 ‘Postdoctoral Research Fellowship’. We would like to thank Erin Conwell and Melanie Goetz for help with data coding. We would also like to thank the following people for their comments: Mara Breen, Dan Grodner, Tessa Warren, Doug Rohde, Jennifer Arnold, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Steven Pinker, Ken Wexler, Mike Tanenhaus, Charles Clifton, Lyn Frazier, Fernanda Ferreira, an anonymous reviewer, and audiences at the 2003 GLOW Workshop on Intonational Phonology and the 2001 CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference.
PY - 2004/12
Y1 - 2004/12
N2 - In this paper, we evaluate several theories of how syntactic/semantic structure influences the placement of intonational boundaries in language production (Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980; Gee & Grosjean, 1983; Ferreira, 1988). Although the theories that we tested are shown to be quite successful, they are complex, and furthermore, they are incompatible with recent evidence for incrementality in sentence production. In light of these problems, we propose a simpler incremental model called the Left hand side/Right hand side Boundary hypothesis (LRB). According to this hypothesis, two factors that underlie the successful performance of the algorithms from the literature contribute to the likelihood of producing intonational boundaries at word boundaries: (1) the size of the recently completed syntactic constituent at a word boundary; and (2) the size of the upcoming syntactic constituent. These factors are further constrained by syntactic argument relationships. We demonstrate that the LRB performs as well as previous models with respect to the data from Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, we present evidence that the LRB outperforms previous models in certain instances. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate that the discourse status of relative clauses is an additional factor in intonational boundary placement.
AB - In this paper, we evaluate several theories of how syntactic/semantic structure influences the placement of intonational boundaries in language production (Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980; Gee & Grosjean, 1983; Ferreira, 1988). Although the theories that we tested are shown to be quite successful, they are complex, and furthermore, they are incompatible with recent evidence for incrementality in sentence production. In light of these problems, we propose a simpler incremental model called the Left hand side/Right hand side Boundary hypothesis (LRB). According to this hypothesis, two factors that underlie the successful performance of the algorithms from the literature contribute to the likelihood of producing intonational boundaries at word boundaries: (1) the size of the recently completed syntactic constituent at a word boundary; and (2) the size of the upcoming syntactic constituent. These factors are further constrained by syntactic argument relationships. We demonstrate that the LRB performs as well as previous models with respect to the data from Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, we present evidence that the LRB outperforms previous models in certain instances. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate that the discourse status of relative clauses is an additional factor in intonational boundary placement.
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U2 - 10.1080/01690960444000070
DO - 10.1080/01690960444000070
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:10944270318
SN - 2327-3798
VL - 19
SP - 713
EP - 755
JO - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
JF - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
IS - 6
ER -