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Related Experiment Videos

Prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences.

Sun-Ah Jun1

  • 1Department of Linguistics, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA. jun@humnet.ucla.edu

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|April 15, 2003
PubMed
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This study reveals a strong link between sentence phrasing and how people interpret relative clauses (RCs) across seven languages. Prosody, or sentence rhythm, directly influences RC attachment, supporting the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH).

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Relative clause (RC) attachment varies across languages with complex NPs.
  • The Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) attempts to explain these attachment differences.
  • Phonological phrasing, or prosody, is proposed as a key factor.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how default sentence phrasing (explicit prosody) differs across seven languages.
  • To determine if prosodic phrasing aligns with individual speaker interpretations of RC attachment.
  • To provide cross-linguistic evidence for the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH).

Main Methods:

  • Comparative analysis of default and non-default prosodic phrasing in English, Greek, Spanish, French, Farsi, Japanese, and Korean.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Correlation of observed prosodic patterns with speaker interpretations of RC attachment.
  • Examination of rhythmic and syntactic factors influencing default phrasing.

    • Main Results:

    • A direct relationship was observed between prosodic phrasing and RC attachment interpretation.
    • Cross-linguistic data strongly supports the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH).
    • Default phrasing is influenced by rhythmic and syntactic interactions.

    Conclusions:

    • Prosodic phrasing plays a crucial role in determining relative clause attachment.
    • The Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) is robust across diverse linguistic structures.
    • Understanding prosody is key to explaining cross-linguistic variations in sentence processing.