Graduate School of Science and Technology, Keio University, Japan.
Cognition. 2012 Nov;125(2):317-23. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.016. Epub 2012 Aug 14.
Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on parsing but whether prosody can impact even the initial parsing decision is still not evident. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing temporarily ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese. Our results showed that listeners used the prosodic cue to make a structural prediction before hearing disambiguating information. Importantly, the effect was limited to cases where the visual scene provided an appropriate context for the prosodic cue, thus eliminating the explanation that listeners have simply associated marked prosodic information with a less frequent structure. Furthermore, the influence of the prosodic information was also evident following disambiguating information, in a way that reflected the initial analysis. The current study demonstrates that prosody, when provided with an appropriate context, influences the initial syntactic analysis and also the subsequent cost at disambiguating information. The results also provide first evidence for pre-head structural prediction driven by prosodic and contextual information with a head-final construction.
许多研究报告指出韵律信息对句法分析有影响，但韵律是否能影响甚至初始的句法分析决策尚不清楚。在一个视觉世界眼动实验中，我们调查了对比重音和视觉语境对日语中暂时歧义关系从句句子的影响。结果表明，听者在听到消除歧义的信息之前，会使用韵律线索做出结构预测。重要的是，这种效果仅限于视觉场景为韵律线索提供适当语境的情况，从而排除了听者只是将标记的韵律信息与不太常见的结构相关联的解释。此外，在提供消除歧义的信息之后，韵律信息的影响也很明显，反映了最初的分析。本研究表明，在提供适当的语境时，韵律会影响初始的句法分析，也会影响消除歧义信息时的后续成本。研究结果还为头尾结构中基于韵律和语境信息的前置结构预测提供了第一个证据。
