The ultimate goal of this research is to help understand sentence comprehension in spoken language. Prosody, or the way a sentence is spoken, is important to sentence understanding, and can be affected by aphasia, autism, and hearing difficulties. Detailed linguistic research is necessary to show how unimpaired adults use both types of prosodic units (accents for emphasis, and prosodic phrasing for grouping) in their processing, so as to better understand and treat disorders in processing. This project specifically explores the effects of pitch accents and focus 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, were usually thought to influence only semantic and discourse representations of a sentence, by marking given, new, and contrastive information. This research follows up on the finding that pitch accents can also attract attachment, and traces the effect to the focus conveyed by accents: focused elements are important to the main assertion of a sentence, and thus draw the attachment of optional modifiers. A series of auditory experiments will explore how accents interact with other focus markers (such as ?only?) in attachment structures and how particular prosodic renditions of disambiguated attachment sentences are perceived in context. Additional experiments will explore three new attachment structures which have shown sensitivity to prosodic boundaries, in order to find out whether accents also affect attachment within possessive structures and wh-questions.
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, interacting with focus particles and context. The better we understand the use of all types of linguistic prosody in language comprehension for unimpaired adults, the better we will be able to analyze prosodic deficits in patients with aphasia, autism, or hearing difficulties, and the better we can plan to treat these problems.
