Effects of pitch accents in attachment ambiguity resolution

Previous work has found that listeners prefer to attach ambiguous syntactic constituents to nouns produced with a pitch accent (Schafer et al., 1996). This study examines what factors underlie previously established accent attachment effects by testing whether these effects are driven by a preference to attach syntactic constituents to new or important information (the Syntax Hypothesis) or whether there is a bias to respond to post-sentence probe questions with an accented word (the Salience Hypothesis). One of the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis is that selection of accented words should be greater when a sentence is complex and processing resources are limited. The results from the experiments presented here show that the probability of listeners' selecting accented words when asked about the interpretation of a relative clause varies with sentence type: listeners selected accented words more frequently in long sentences than in short sentences, consistent with the predictions of the Salience Hypothesis. Furthermore, Experiment 4 demonstrates that listeners are more likely to respond to post-sentence questions with accented words than with non-accented words, even when no ambiguity is present, and even when the response results in an incorrect answer. These findings suggest that accent-driven attachment effects found in earlier studies reflect a post-sentence selection process rather than a syntactic processing mechanism.