Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The goal of much of the psycholinguistic work on sentence processing has\nbeen to identify the sources of information that listeners/readers use to make first-pass\n'parsing' decisions and to specify the time course at which they use these sources.\nSome theories argue that the parser only has access to syntactic information initially,\nwhile other accounts claim that the parser has immediate access to multiple sources of information, such as plausibility/thematic fit, which can reduce the likelihood that\nlisteners/readers will construct an erroneous first-pass parse. Interestingly, this work\nhas largely ignored a major property of language that is processed in the auditory\nmodality ??? prosodic information. In principle, prosodic information could cue and\nbias listeners towards a certain syntactic parse before they actively make a parsing\ndecision. As such, any comprehensive model of auditory language processing would\nbe well-advised to address the role of prosody.\nThis dissertation approached this issue from two different but complementary\nperspectives. First, prosody was examined from the position of the speaker and then,\nfrom the position of the listener. Study 1 explored how speakers produced prosody at\nthe lexical level by unconsciously biasing them to produce a particular interpretation\nof an ambiguous idiomatic phrase embedded in a sentence. Acoustic analyses\nrevealed that speakers produced distinct acoustic cues to differentiate between the two\npossible meanings. Study 2 examined if these acoustic differences could be reflected\nat even lower-levels of the speech production system, such as the kinematic/motor\nspeech level. Kinematic analyses also showed that speakers moved their articulators\ndifferently to distinguish between the two interpretations of an ambiguous idiomatic\nphrase. Study 3 used pupillometry to investigate the role of prosody in on-line\nsentence processing, particularly when pitted against thematic fit information. Results\nindicated that prosody drives first-pass parsing decisions more strongly than\nplausibility. This dissertation demonstrates that prosody as an important source of\ninformation both in production and comprehension. Speakers produce acoustic cues\nthat coincide with the intent of their utterances and move their articulators differently\nin conjunction with these cues, and listeners exploit these cues in real time to assist in\nrapid sentence processing and comprehension.
Author: Dorothy Yang
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2294360514