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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Interplay Of Syntactic Parsing Strategies And Prosodic Phrase Lengths In Processing Turkish Sentences, Nazik Dinctopal-Deniz
The Interplay Of Syntactic Parsing Strategies And Prosodic Phrase Lengths In Processing Turkish Sentences, Nazik Dinctopal-Deniz
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Many experiments have shown that the prosody (rhythm and melody) with which a sentence is uttered can provide a listener with cues to its syntactic structure (Lehiste, 1973, and since). A few studies have observed in addition that an inappropriate prosodic contour can mislead the syntactic parsing routines, resulting in a prosody-induced garden-path. These include, among others, Speer et al. (1996) and Kjelgaard and Speer (1999) for English. The studies by Speer et al. and Kjelgaard and Speer (SKS) showed that misplaced prosodic cues caused more processing difficulty in sentences with early closure of a clause (EC syntax) than in …
Understanding Doubly Center-Embedded Sentences Through Contrastive Focus, Ashley Caroline Thorne
Understanding Doubly Center-Embedded Sentences Through Contrastive Focus, Ashley Caroline Thorne
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
A production and comprehension-judgment experiment examined the relationship between prosody and comprehensibility in doubly center-embedded relative clause constructions in English. Lexically identical sentences with contrastive emphasis on NP1, NP2, or VP1, and a baseline version for comparison, were read aloud for recording and judged for comprehensibility. Contrast on NP2 and VP1 yielded higher comprehensibility judgments compared to baseline than contrast on NP1 compared to baseline. This was contrary to the prediction that contrast on NP1 would encourage the prosodic pattern NP1 || RC || VP3, which in previous work has been reported to be optimal for comprehension. Several explanations for …