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Phrase length matters: the interplay between implicit prosody and syntax in Korean "garden path" sentences.
Hyekyung Hwang1, Karsten Steinhauer
1McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3G 1A8, Canada.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
|March 12, 2011
Summary
Phrase length in written sentences impacts cognitive processing during silent reading. Longer phrases aid in resolving comprehension difficulties, supporting implicit prosody theories.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Spoken language comprehension involves interactions between syntactic parsing and prosody, influenced by phrase length.
- Theories of "implicit prosody" propose that prosodic information is also generated during silent reading.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if phrase length affects on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading.
- To examine the role of implicit prosody in syntactic parsing decisions in written language.
Main Methods:
- Used event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure brain responses during silent reading of Korean sentences.
- Manipulated the length of sentence-initial subject noun phrases (NPs) in ambiguous sentence beginnings.
- Analyzed ERP components like closure positive shift (CPS) and P600 to identify processing effects.
Main Results:
- Longer subject NPs elicited an additional prosodic boundary, indicated by a closure positive shift (CPS) in ERPs.
- Sentences with longer NPs showed reduced P600 amplitudes when resolving "garden path" effects.
- Delayed prosodic revisions in short NP conditions were associated with a frontal P600-like positivity.
Conclusions:
- Subvocally generated prosodic boundaries after long subject NPs facilitate recovery from processing difficulties (garden path effects).
- Findings support theories where implicit prosody aids syntactic parsing in silent reading.
- Provides cross-linguistic evidence for the on-line use of implicit prosody in written language comprehension.
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