Carlson Katy, Clifton Charles, Frazier Lyn
Morehead State University, Morehead, Kentucky, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2009 Oct;37(7):1014-25. doi: 10.3758/MC.37.7.1014.
Placing a prosodic boundary before a phrase may influence its syntactic analysis. However, the boundary's effect depends on the presence, size, and position of other, earlier, prosodic boundaries. In three experiments, we extend previous results about the effect of the position of the early boundary. In sentences in which a final phrase may modify either a local verb or an earlier verb, a boundary immediately after the first verb leads to more first-verb attachments than when the earlier boundary appears in another position between the two verbs (Experiments 1 and 2). This effect cannot be attributed to weaker effects of more distant boundaries (Experiment 2), but is likely due to the first verb being more prominent when a boundary immediately follows it, since similar effects are observed when the verb is accented (Experiment 3). The results support the informative boundary hypothesis and show that the impact of earlier, nonlocal boundaries is not fully uniform.
在一个短语之前设置韵律边界可能会影响其句法分析。然而，该边界的影响取决于其他更早的韵律边界的存在、大小和位置。在三个实验中，我们扩展了先前关于早期边界位置影响的研究结果。在一个句子中，最后一个短语可能修饰局部动词或更早的动词，第一个动词之后紧接着一个边界时，与早期边界出现在两个动词之间的其他位置相比，会导致更多的对第一个动词的依存关系（实验1和2）。这种效应不能归因于更远距离边界的较弱影响（实验2），但很可能是由于紧跟边界的第一个动词更突出，因为当动词重读时也观察到了类似的效应（实验3）。这些结果支持了信息性边界假说，并表明早期的、非局部边界的影响并非完全一致。
