Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Informative prosodic boundaries.

Charles Clifton1, Katy Carlson, Lyn Frazier

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 01003, USA. cec@psych.umass.edu

Language and Speech
|March 5, 2003
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Do linguistic stimuli activate experiential colour traces related to the entities they refer to and, if so, under what circumstances?

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)·2023
Same author

The prosodic accent advantage in phoneme detection: Importance of local context.

Attention, perception & psychophysics·2021
Same author

Negative clauses imply affirmative topics and affirmative antecedents.

Journal of psycholinguistic research·2021
Same author

Focus Attracts Attachment.

Language and speech·2021
Same author

Interpreting Adjuncts: Processing English <i>As-</i>Clauses.

Language and speech·2021
Same author

Preceding syllables are necessary for the accent advantage effect.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·2020
Same journal

Prominence and Grouping in Papuan Malay Prosody Perception.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

Perceptual Tuning to Structure: Integrating the Phonetic Detail of Coarticulatory Vowel Nasalization With Prosodic and Information Structure.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

An Investigation of the Phonetic Variation of the Word-Initial /l/ and /n/ Across Regional Varieties of Mandarin.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

How Much Do We Imitate in a Non-Native Language? Explicit Versus Implicit Imitation in L2 Speech.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

Motivation, Anxiety, and Enjoyment in L2 Pronunciation: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Study.

Language and speech·2026
Same journal

Allophonic Variation in L1 and L2 English Laterals: Evidence from L1 Japanese-L2 English Speakers.

Language and speech·2026
See all related articles

Prosodic boundary interpretation depends on relative, not absolute, size. This "informative boundary" hypothesis was supported across various sentence structures in listening experiments.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Phonetics

Background:

  • Prosodic boundaries in speech can influence syntactic interpretation.
  • Previous models suggested boundary size directly impacts interpretation.
  • The "informative boundary" hypothesis proposes relative boundary size is key.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test the "informative boundary" hypothesis against context-independent interpretations of prosodic boundaries.
  • To investigate how relative prosodic boundary size affects syntactic ambiguity resolution in English.

Main Methods:

  • Three listening experiments were conducted.
  • Participants interpreted sentences with manipulated prosodic boundaries.
  • Syntactic structures, constituent types, and boundary sizes were varied.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Experiment 1 confirmed the informative boundary hypothesis in specific noun phrases.
  • Experiment 2 showed support across diverse syntactic structures, except for "-ly" adverbs.
  • Experiment 3 demonstrated interpretation was sensitive to relevant, but not irrelevant, early boundaries.

Conclusions:

  • Prosodic boundary interpretation is relative to other boundaries, not absolute.
  • The informative boundary hypothesis provides a robust account of prosodic influence on syntax.
  • Further research is needed for exceptions like "-ly" adverbs.