Hirotani Masako, Terry J Michael, Sadato Norihiro
Language and Brain Laboratory, School of Linguistics and Language Studies and Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton UniversityOttawa, ON, Canada; Department of System Neuroscience, National Institute for Physiological SciencesOkazaki, Japan; Department of Linguistics, The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillChapel Hill, NC, USA.
Department of Linguistics, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Front Psychol. 2016 Oct 7;7:1465. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01465. eCollection 2016.
Prosody plays an important role in online sentence processing both explicitly and implicitly. It has been shown that prosodically packaging together parts of a sentence that are interpreted together facilitates processing of the sentence. This applies not only to explicit prosody but also implicit prosody. The present work hypothesizes that a line break in a written text induces an implicit prosodic break, which, in turn, should result in a processing bias for interpreting English wh-questions. Two experiments-one self-paced reading study and one questionnaire study-are reported. Both supported the "line break" hypothesis mentioned above. The results of the self-paced reading experiment showed that unambiguous wh-questions were read faster when the location of line breaks (or frame breaks) matched the scope of a wh-phrase (main or embedded clause) than when they did not. The questionnaire tested sentences with an ambiguous wh-phrase, one that could attach either to the main or the embedded clause. These sentences were interpreted as attaching to the main clause more often than to the embedded clause when a line break appeared after the main verb, but not when it appeared after the embedded verb.
韵律在在线句子处理中无论是显性还是隐性都起着重要作用。研究表明，将在语义上一起解读的句子部分进行韵律打包，有助于句子的处理。这不仅适用于显性韵律，也适用于隐性韵律。本研究假设书面文本中的换行会引发隐性韵律停顿，进而导致在解读英语特殊疑问句时产生处理偏向。本文报告了两项实验——一项自定步速阅读研究和一项问卷调查研究。两项实验均支持上述“换行”假设。自定步速阅读实验结果表明，当换行（或框架分隔）位置与特殊疑问词短语（主句或嵌入从句）的范围匹配时，明确的特殊疑问句的阅读速度比不匹配时更快。问卷调查测试了带有歧义特殊疑问词短语的句子，该短语既可以附加到主句，也可以附加到嵌入从句。当换行出现在主要动词之后时，这些句子被解释为更多地附加到主句而非嵌入从句，但当换行出现在嵌入动词之后时则不然。
