Prosody and parsing in coordination structures

The effect of prosodic boundary cues on the off-line disambiguation and on-line parsing of coordination structures was examined. It was found that relative clauses were attached to coordinated object noun phrases in preference to second conjuncts in sentences like: The lawyer greeted the powerful barrister and the wise judge who was/were walking to the courtroom. Naive speakers signalled the syntactic contrast between the two structures by a prosodic break between the conjuncts when the relative clause was attached to the second conjunct. Listeners were able to use this prosodic information in both off-line syntactic disambiguation and on-line syntactic parsing. The findings are compatible with a model in which prosody has a strong immediate effect on parsing. It is argued that the current experimental design has avoided confounds present in earlier studies on the on-line integration of prosodic and syntactic information.