The interplay between prosody and syntax in sentence processing: the case of subject- and object-control verbs

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Auditory sentence processing involves determining syntactic structure.
• Prosodic information, such as prosodic breaks (PB), may guide syntactic analysis.
• The role of prosody in resolving syntactic ambiguity in Dutch is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether prosodic information affects syntactic analysis choice in auditory sentence processing.
• To examine the interaction between prosodic breaks and verb control type (subject vs. object) in syntactic ambiguity resolution.
• To determine if prosodic breaks influence syntactic processing differently for subject- and object-control verbs.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Off-line fragment completion tests (visual and auditory) to establish default syntactic preferences for Dutch sentences with subject- and object-control verbs.
• Experiment 2: On-line electroencephalography (ERP) study to measure brain responses during auditory sentence processing.
• Manipulation of prosodic breaks (PB) in locally ambiguous sentences and analysis of N400 effects and closure positive shifts.

Main Results:

• Subject- and object-control verbs differentially influence listeners' expected syntactic structures.
• Prosodic breaks (PB) elicited a closure positive shift, consistent with prior research.
• In subject-control items, an N400 effect indicated a default preference aligning with the PB's effect.
• In object-control items, an N400 effect was observed with a PB, but not without it, suggesting PB's influence on syntactic analysis.

Conclusions:

• Prosodic information, specifically prosodic breaks, can significantly affect syntactic analysis during auditory sentence processing.
• The influence of prosodic breaks on syntactic resolution interacts with verb control type.
• Prosodic breaks aid in resolving syntactic ambiguity for object-control verbs, but their effect is less pronounced for subject-control verbs due to pre-existing biases.