Intonational disambiguation in sentence production and comprehension

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Phonetics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Prosodic marking of syntactic constituency is typically studied in reading tasks, which lack natural conversational constraints.
• Existing methods for studying spontaneous speech lack controlled contrasts needed for linguistic analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how speakers use prosody to signal syntactic structure in a controlled, yet ecologically valid, communicative context.
• To determine if listeners can utilize these prosodic cues for syntactic disambiguation.

Main Methods:

• A cooperative game task was designed where speakers negotiated moves using a predetermined utterance set.
• Phonetic and phonological analyses were performed on recorded speech, focusing on prosodic variations in early versus late closure ambiguities.
• A comprehension task was conducted to assess listeners' ability to use prosodic cues for disambiguation.

Main Results:

• Speakers reliably signal syntactic differences (early vs. late closure) using prosody, even when context could resolve the ambiguity.
• Prosodic cues were found to be effective for disambiguating syntactically ambiguous speech fragments.
• Listeners successfully used prosodic information to categorize utterances, demonstrating the communicative function of prosody.

Conclusions:

• Prosody plays a crucial role in marking syntactic structure during natural speech production.
• Listeners effectively leverage prosodic cues to resolve syntactic ambiguities, highlighting the importance of prosody in spoken language comprehension.
• The cooperative game task provides a valuable paradigm for studying prosody in ecologically valid communicative settings.