A Prosodic Focus Study on the Differentiation of Syntactic Structural Ambiguity from the Perspective of Experimental Phonetics: A Case Study of The Mother of Three Children
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Research on how prosody guides the parsing of structurally ambiguous strings has increasingly pointed to the role of prosodic focus. Focusing on the English noun phrase the mother of three children, we test whether focus placement helps listeners and readers disambiguate structure. We conduct two complementary studies: an acoustic production experiment examining how speakers realize focus on the head noun versus the prepositional phrase, and a perception experiment probing whether those patterns are used as cues to interpretation. Across tasks, focus placement modulates ambiguity resolution: productions show systematic differences in prominence and phrasing when focus targets distinct constituents, and listeners are more likely to adopt the interpretation aligned with the realized focus. The effect is reliable but not uniform across tokens and participants, suggesting that focus interacts with other cues available in context. These findings clarify how prosodic focus functions as a structural cue in real-time processing and delineate the conditions under which it is most informative for syntactic disambiguation.
Author: Xingwen Xu
Institution: Heilongjiang University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4408991436