9422153 This grant will support a special session on "The Role of Prosody in Sentence Parsing" at the Eighth Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, to be held at the University of Arizona in March, 1995. Up until recently, by far the majority of sentence-processing research has used visual presentation of stimuli, in part because this makes it possible to timelock the input to the subject's response. But more recently, as computers and speech editing software have increased in capacity and reduced in price, researchers have begun to examine the role of prosody during the processing of auditorily-presented sentences. This new wave of research circumvents a common worry in visually-presented stimuli: orthographic representations of language do not adequately represent many of the non-segmental properties of speech and, obviously, speech is the more natural modality for human language. Intuitively, prosodic cues--changes in the pitch, amplitude and duration of syllables and changes in pause length--should be useful to listeners. Whether they actually are is an empirical question which a number of researchers are currently investigating. The goal of this special session of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference is to bring together researchers who are studying the on-line effects of prosody on sentence parsing to present and synthesize recent results, and to raise points of controversy. We intend to publish these papers as part of either a special issue of the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research or a book.
