Blasko D G, Hall M D
Department of Psychology, Penn State Erie 16563-1501, USA.
Percept Mot Skills. 1998 Aug;87(1):3-18. doi: 10.2466/pms.1998.87.1.3.
Three experiments investigated the role of prosody in the comprehension of auditory sentences. In Exp. 1 an analysis of three novice talkers and one expert talker verified the production parameters of one type of syntactic ambiguity and showed that pitch cues were more prominent than duration cues. In Exp. 2, 16 listeners used prosodic information to make consistent decisions reliably about phrase boundaries. In Exp. 3, 40 participants listened to sentences in which prosody was inconsistent with later morphosyntactic information, indicated their understanding, and then judged whether a visual target was related to the meaning of the sentence. Inconsistent prosody slowed comprehension and contributed to slower, less accurate judgments of sentence meaning. This suggests that prosodic information contributes to the perception of spoken language and can affect comprehension even when the syntactic structure indicated by prosody is contradicted by subsequent morphosyntactic information.
三项实验研究了韵律在听觉句子理解中的作用。在实验1中，对三名新手说话者和一名专家说话者的分析验证了一种句法歧义的产生参数，并表明音高线索比时长线索更为突出。在实验2中，16名听众利用韵律信息可靠地对短语边界做出了一致的判断。在实验3中，40名参与者听了韵律与后来的形态句法信息不一致的句子，表明他们的理解，然后判断一个视觉目标是否与句子的意思相关。不一致的韵律减缓了理解速度，并导致对句子意思的判断更慢、更不准确。这表明韵律信息有助于口语的感知，即使韵律所指示的句法结构与随后的形态句法信息相矛盾，也会影响理解。
