Clifton Charles, Carlson Katy, Frazier Lyn
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2006 Oct;13(5):854-61. doi: 10.3758/bf03194009.
The rational speaker hypothesis (Clifton, Carlson, & Frazier, 2002) claims that speakers are self-consistent, employing intonation in a manner consistent with their intended message. Preceding a constituent by a prosodic boundary that is not required by the grammar often signals that this constituent is not part of the immediately preceding phrase. However, speakers tend to place prosodic boundaries before and after long constituents. The question is whether prosodic boundaries will have a larger influence on listeners' choice of an analysis when they flank short constituents than when they flank long ones. The results of two listening experiments indicate that they do, suggesting that listeners attend not just to properties of the input signal, but also to the reasons why speakers produce those properties.
理性说话者假设（克利夫顿、卡尔森和弗雷泽，2002）声称，说话者是自我一致的，他们以与预期信息一致的方式使用语调。在一个成分之前加上语法不需要的韵律边界，通常表明这个成分不是紧接在前的短语的一部分。然而，说话者倾向于在长成分的前后设置韵律边界。问题在于，当韵律边界位于短成分两侧时，与位于长成分两侧时相比，对听众的分析选择是否会有更大的影响。两项听力实验的结果表明确实如此，这表明听众不仅关注输入信号的属性，还关注说话者产生这些属性的原因。
