2
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Untrained speakers' use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation and listeners' interpretations.

      1 ,
      Psychological research
      Springer Science and Business Media LLC

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          We investigated how naively produced prosody affects listeners' end interpretations of ambiguous utterances. Non-professional speakers who were unaware of any ambiguity produced ambiguous sentences couched in short, unambiguous passages. In a forced-choice task, listeners could not tell which context the isolated ambiguous sentences came from (Exp. 1). However, listeners were able to correctly paraphrase the least ambiguous subset of these utterances, showing that prosody can be used to resolve ambiguity (Exp. 2). Nonetheless, in everyday language use, both prosody and context are available to interpret speech. When the least ambiguous sentences were cross-spliced into contexts biasing towards their original interpretations or into contexts biasing towards their alternative interpretations, answers to content questions about the ambiguous sentence, confidence ratings, and ratings of naturalness all indicated that prosody is ignored when context is available (Exp. 3). Although listeners can use prosody to interpret ambiguous sentences, they generally do not, and this makes sense in light of the frequent lack of reliable prosodic cues in everyday speech.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Psychol Res
          Psychological research
          Springer Science and Business Media LLC
          0340-0727
          0340-0727
          2000
          : 63
          : 1
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Psychology Department, University of California, Santa Cruz 95064, USA. foxtree@cats.ucsc.edu
          Article
          10.1007/pl00008163
          10743382
          6c2de302-61ab-4149-9f55-d94251cc370a
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article