Priming Implicit Prosody: Prosodic Boundaries and Individual Differences

Using the structural priming paradigm, the present study explores predictions made by the implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH) by testing whether an implicit prosodic boundary generated from a silently read sentence influences attachment preference for a novel, subsequently read sentence. Results indicate that such priming does occur, as evidenced by an effect on relative clause attachment. In particular, priming an implicit boundary directly before a relative clause--cued by commas in orthography--encouraged high attachment of that relative clause, although the size of the effect depended somewhat on individual differences in pragmatic/communication skills (as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient). Thus, in addition to supporting the basic claims of the IPH, the present study demonstrates the relevance of such individual differences to sentence processing, and that implicit prosodic structure, like syntactic structure, can be primed.