This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of linguistic prosody (as opposed to affective or emotional prosody) on sentence processing. In particular, it explores the effects of pitch accents on syntactically ambiguous sentences. It is well-known that prosodic boundaries, one of the two major prosodic units in English, can affect the attachment of ambiguous phrases. Pitch accents, on the other hand, are usually thought to influence only semantic and discourse representations of a sentence, by marking given vs. new vs. contrastive information. This research explores the hypothesis that pitch accents can attract attachment, especially in the presence of a prosodic boundary after the nearest attachment site. A series of auditory experiments will explore accent effects on attachment in three different syntactic structures, with and without supportive prosodic boundaries. Following experiments will place the sentences in contexts to examine whether the focus conveyed by a preceding question can also attract attachment and whether accents remain informative for attachment when they clearly contrast with prior context.
This project will contribute to a fuller understanding of how prosody, or the tune and rhythm of language, affects sentence processing. It explores how pitch accents, an aspect of linguistic prosody (rather than affective or emotional prosody), can modify the syntactic structure and meaning of a sentence. The better we understand the use of linguistic prosody and its sub-units in language comprehension for unimpaired adults, the better we will be able to analyze what uses are disordered vs. spared in patients with aphasia or other types of brain damage or children with hearing difficulties, and the better we can plan to treat these problems.
