Related Experiment Videos
Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity
D W Allbritton1, G McKoon, R Ratcliff
1Psychology Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA. allbritt+@pitt.edu
Summary
Untrained speakers do not naturally use prosody to clarify ambiguous sentences. However, when instructed, speakers can produce prosodic cues for clear communication.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Speech Communication
- Experimental Psychology
Background:
- Listeners utilize prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguities in spoken language.
- The production of disambiguating prosodic cues by untrained speakers is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether naive, untrained speakers produce necessary prosodic cues for disambiguating sentences in experimental settings.
- To determine if speakers can intentionally produce prosodic cues when aware of sentence ambiguities.
Main Methods:
- Experiments involving professional and untrained speakers reading ambiguous sentences.
- Analysis of prosodic cue production in natural reading versus instructed disambiguation.
Main Results:
- Neither professional nor untrained speakers consistently produced disambiguating prosodic cues when reading ambiguous sentences naturally.
- Speakers intentionally producing one meaning over another generated sufficient prosodic cues for listeners to identify the intended meaning.
Conclusions:
- Untrained speakers do not spontaneously produce prosodic cues to resolve syntactic ambiguities.
- Intentional production of prosody is effective for disambiguating spoken sentences, suggesting a cognitive control over prosodic delivery.