Tree J E, Meijer P J
Psychology Department, University of California, Santa Cruz 95064, USA.
Psychol Res. 2000;63(1):1-13. doi: 10.1007/pl00008163.
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.
我们研究了自然产生的韵律如何影响听众对歧义话语的最终理解。不知道存在任何歧义的非专业说话者，在简短、无歧义的段落中说出歧义句子。在一项强制选择任务中，听众无法判断孤立的歧义句子来自哪种语境（实验1）。然而，听众能够正确地释义这些话语中歧义最小的子集，表明韵律可用于消除歧义（实验2）。尽管如此，在日常语言使用中，韵律和语境都可用于解释言语。当将歧义最小的句子交叉拼接成偏向其原始解释的语境或偏向其替代解释的语境时，关于歧义句子的内容问题的答案、置信度评级和自然度评级均表明，当有语境可用时，韵律会被忽略（实验3）。虽然听众可以使用韵律来解释歧义句子，但他们通常不会这样做，鉴于日常言语中经常缺乏可靠的韵律线索，这是有道理的。
