Processing syntactically ambiguous sentences: evidence from semantic priming

Musical Garden Paths: Evidence for Syntactic Revision Beyond the Linguistic Domain

While theoretical and empirical insights suggest that the capacity to represent and process complex syntax is crucial in language as well as other domains, it is still unclear whether specific parsing mechanisms are also shared across domains. Focusing on the musical domain, we developed a novel behavioral paradigm to investigate whether a phenomenon of syntactic revision occurs in the processing of tonal melodies under analogous conditions as in language. We present the first proof-of-existence for syntactic revision in a set of tonally ambiguous melodies, supporting the relevance of syntactic representations and parsing with language-like characteristics in a nonlinguistic domain. Furthermore, we find no evidence for a modulatory effect of musical training, suggesting that a general cognitive capacity, rather than explicit knowledge and strategies, may underlie the observed phenomenon in music.

Effects of Implicit Prosody and Semantic Bias on the Resolution of Ambiguous Chinese Phrases

By manipulating the location of prosodic boundary and the semantic bias of the ambiguous "V+N1+de+N2" phrase, which is composed of one verb (V), one noun (N1), one functional word (de), and another noun (N2), this study investigated how prosodic boundary and the semantic bias affect the processing of temporary ambiguous sentences formed by the ambiguous phrase "V+N1+de+N2" through an eye movement experiment. We found the effect of prosodic boundary in the late processing stage and observed an interaction between prosodic boundary and the semantic bias of ambiguous phrases as well. The participants required more time for fixation and more regressions occurred when the meaning of the ambiguous phrase guided by prosodic boundary was inconsistent with context, especially when the ambiguous phrase was biased to the narrative-object phrase. This result suggests that prosodic boundary affects the processing of temporal ambiguous sentences and is influenced by the semantic bias of the ambiguous phrase. These findings provide further evidence from Chinese that indicate that implicit prosody plays a general role in language comprehension.

Role of Working Memory Storage and Attention Focus Switching in Children’s Comprehension of Spoken Object Relative Sentences

The present study evaluated a two-mechanism memory model of the online auditory comprehension of object relative (OR) sentences in 7–11-year-old typically developing children. Mechanisms of interest included working memory storage (WMS) and attention focus switching. We predicted that both mechanisms would be important for comprehension. Forty-four children completed a listening span task indexing WMS, an auditory attention focus switching task, and an agent selection task indexing spoken sentence comprehension. Regression analyses indicated that WMS and attention focus switching accuracy each accounted for significant and unique variance in the children’s OR comprehension after accounting for age. Results were interpreted to suggest that WMS is important for OR comprehension by supporting children’s ability to retain both noun phrase 1 and noun phrase 2 prior to their reactivating noun phrase 1 from memory in order to integrate it into a developing structure. Attention focus switching was interpreted to be critical in supporting children’s noun phrase 1 reactivation, as they needed to switch their focus of attention momentarily away from ongoing language processing to memory retrieval.

The on-line study of sentence comprehension: an examination of dual task paradigms

This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to intrusion by extra-sentential probe words in two on-line dual-task techniques commonly used to study sentence processing: the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm and the unimodal all-visual lexical priming paradigm. It provides both a general review and a direct empirical examination of the effects of task-demand in the on-line study of sentence comprehension. In all three studies, sentential materials were presented to participants together with a target probe word which constituted either a better or a worse continuation of the sentence at a point at which it was presented. Materials were identical for all three studies. The manner of presentation of the sentence materials was, however, manipulated; presentation was either visual, auditory (normal rate) or auditory (slow rate). The results demonstrate that a technique in which a visual target probe interrupts ongoing sentence processing (such as occurs in unimodal visual presentation and in very slow auditory sentence presentation) encourages the integration of the probe word into the on-going sentence. Thus, when using such 'sentence interrupting' techniques, additional care to equate probes is necessary. Importantly, however, the results provide strong evidence that the standard use of fluent cross-modality sentence investigation methods are immune from such external probe word intrusions into ongoing sentence processing and are thus accurately reflect underlying comprehension processes.

Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: a literature review

Research on the exploitation of prosodic information in the comprehension of spoken language is reviewed. The research falls into three main areas: the use of prosody in the recognition of spoken words, in which most attention has been paid to the question of whether the prosodic structure of a word plays a role in initial activation of stored lexical representations; the use of prosody in the computation of syntactic structure, in which the resolution of global and local ambiguities has formed the central focus; and the role of prosody in the processing of discourse structure, in which there has been a preponderance of work on the contribution of accentuation and deaccentuation to integration of concepts with an existing discourse model. The review reveals that in each area progress has been made towards new conceptions of prosody's role in processing, and in particular this has involved abandonment of previously held deterministic views of the relationship between prosodic structure and other aspects of linguistic structure.

Prosody and the processing of filler-gap sentences

This study was designed to explore the effects of linguistic prosody on the processing of "filler-gap" sentences. We designed two experiments to determine first whether the sentence processor uses information contained in the prosodic contour of an utterance during on-line processing, and second the form that information may take. In Experiment 1, we found that prosody apparently influences when listeners posit gaps on-line. In Experiment 2, we obtained acoustic evidence that gaps are represented in the prosodic contour of an utterance. The results of this study support a view in which prosody contributes very early to on-line structure building mechanisms during sentence processing.