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Updated: Aug 7, 2025
04:30
An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
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Are prosodic effects on sentence comprehension dependent on age?
Talita Fortunato-Tavares1,2, Richard G Schwartz2, Claudia Regina Furquim de Andrade3
1Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences Department, Lehman College, City University of New York - New York (NY), USA.
Codas
|March 8, 2023
Summary
Prosody affects sentence understanding in Brazilian Portuguese speakers. However, neither the absolute boundary hypothesis nor the relative boundary hypothesis fully explained how prosodic boundaries aid in disambiguating sentences for children and adults.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistic Phonetics
Background:
- Prosodic structure significantly influences the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences.
- Limited research exists on prosody's role in spoken language comprehension in non-English languages, especially concerning development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate prosodic boundary effects on comprehending attachment ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese.
- To evaluate the absolute boundary hypothesis (ABH) and the relative boundary hypothesis (RBH) concerning boundary strength.
Main Methods:
- A computerized sentence comprehension task was administered to 23 adults and 15 children.
- Syntactically ambiguous sentences were presented in eight prosodic variations, manipulating F0, duration, and pause to test ABH and RBH predictions.
Main Results:
- Children and adults exhibited different responses to prosodic influences on syntactic processing.
- Children were significantly slower than adults in comprehension tasks.
- Sentence interpretation was demonstrably affected by variations in prosodic forms.
Conclusions:
- The absolute boundary hypothesis and relative boundary hypothesis did not adequately explain the use of prosodic boundaries for sentence disambiguation in Brazilian Portuguese speakers.
- Findings suggest that the influence of prosodic boundaries on disambiguation may vary across languages.
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