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Updated: May 19, 2026
08:32
Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure
Chie Nakamura1, Manabu Arai, Reiko Mazuka
1Graduate School of Science and Technology, Keio University, Japan. nak@brain.riken.jp
Cognition
|August 21, 2012
Summary
Prosody and context guide sentence parsing. Listeners use intonation and visual cues for early structural predictions in Japanese, influencing subsequent processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Prosodic information's effect on sentence parsing is established.
- Its influence on initial parsing decisions remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate prosody's impact on early parsing decisions.
- Examine the role of contrastive intonation and visual context in Japanese relative clause processing.
Main Methods:
- Visual world eye-tracking experiment.
- Processing of temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese.
Main Results:
- Listeners predicted sentence structure using prosody before disambiguation.
- Prosodic influence depended on appropriate visual context.
- Prosody affected processing even after disambiguating information.
Conclusions:
- Contextualized prosody influences initial syntactic analysis.
- Prosody impacts subsequent processing costs at disambiguation points.
- First evidence for pre-head structural prediction in head-final constructions using prosody and context.
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