Related Experiment Videos
Prosody and the processing of filler-gap sentences
H N Nagel1, L P Shapiro, R Nawy
1Center for Human Information Processing, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|November 1, 1994
Summary
Linguistic prosody, or the rhythm and intonation of speech, influences how listeners process sentences with missing elements (filler-gap sentences) in real-time. Findings show prosody impacts gap identification and is integrated early in sentence comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Speech Processing
Background:
- Understanding sentence processing is key to psycholinguistics.
- Filler-gap sentences present unique challenges for real-time comprehension.
- The role of prosody in sentence processing remains an active area of research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the influence of linguistic prosody on the on-line processing of filler-gap sentences.
- To determine if prosodic contours affect gap identification during sentence comprehension.
- To examine the acoustic evidence for gap representation within prosody.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments were conducted to analyze the effects of prosody.
- Experiment 1 focused on the timing of gap positing influenced by prosody.
- Experiment 2 used acoustic analysis to find evidence of gaps in prosodic contours.
Main Results:
- Prosody significantly influences when listeners identify gaps in sentences.
- Acoustic data confirmed that gaps are encoded within the utterance's prosodic contour.
- Listeners utilize prosodic information very early in sentence structure building.
Conclusions:
- Prosody plays a crucial role in the immediate processing of complex sentence structures.
- The findings support models where prosody is an early contributor to sentence comprehension.
- This research highlights the integration of acoustic cues in real-time language understanding.