Schafer A J, Speer S R, Warren P, White S D
Department of Linguistics, University of California at Los Angeles 90095-1543, USA.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2000 Mar;29(2):169-82. doi: 10.1023/a:1005192911512.
Speakers' prosodic marking of syntactic constituency is often measured in sentence reading tasks that lack realistic situational constraints on speaking. Results from such studies can be criticized because the pragmatic goals of readers differ dramatically from those of speakers in typical conversation. On the other hand, recordings of unscripted speech do not readily yield the carefully controlled contrasts required for many research purposes. Our research employs a cooperative game task, in which two speakers use utterances from a predetermined set to negotiate moves around gameboards. Results from a set of early versus late closure ambiguities suggest that speakers signal this syntactic difference with prosody even when the utterance context fully disambiguates the structure. Phonetic and phonological analyses show reliable prosodic disambiguation in speakers' productions; results of a comprehension task indicate that listeners can successfully use prosodic cues to categorize syntactically ambiguous fragments as portions of early or late closure utterances.
在缺乏现实情境口语限制的句子阅读任务中，常对说话者句法成分的韵律标记进行测量。此类研究结果可能会受到批评，因为读者的语用目标与典型对话中说话者的语用目标截然不同。另一方面，无脚本言语的录音不易产生许多研究目的所需的严格控制的对比。我们的研究采用了一种合作游戏任务，其中两名说话者使用预先确定的一组话语来协商在游戏板上的行动。一组关于早期闭合与晚期闭合歧义的结果表明，即使话语语境完全消除了结构歧义，说话者仍会用韵律来表明这种句法差异。语音和音系分析表明，说话者的言语产出中存在可靠的韵律歧义消除；一项理解任务的结果表明，听众能够成功地利用韵律线索将句法歧义片段归类为早期闭合或晚期闭合话语的一部分。
