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Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure.

Publication ,  Journal Article
Nakamura, C; Arai, M; Mazuka, R
Published in: Cognition
November 2012

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.

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Published In

Cognition

DOI

EISSN

1873-7838

ISSN

0010-0277

Publication Date

November 2012

Volume

125

Issue

2

Start / End Page

317 / 323

Related Subject Headings

  • Speech Perception
  • Speech
  • Photic Stimulation
  • Linguistics
  • Humans
  • Fixation, Ocular
  • Eye Movements
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Attention
  • 20 Language, Communication and Culture
 

Citation

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Nakamura, C., Arai, M., & Mazuka, R. (2012). Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure. Cognition, 125(2), 317–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.016
Nakamura, Chie, Manabu Arai, and Reiko Mazuka. “Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure.Cognition 125, no. 2 (November 2012): 317–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.016.
Nakamura C, Arai M, Mazuka R. Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure. Cognition. 2012 Nov;125(2):317–23.
Nakamura, Chie, et al. “Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure.Cognition, vol. 125, no. 2, Nov. 2012, pp. 317–23. Epmc, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.016.
Nakamura C, Arai M, Mazuka R. Immediate use of prosody and context in predicting a syntactic structure. Cognition. 2012 Nov;125(2):317–323.
Journal cover image

Published In

Cognition

DOI

EISSN

1873-7838

ISSN

0010-0277

Publication Date

November 2012

Volume

125

Issue

2

Start / End Page

317 / 323

Related Subject Headings

  • Speech Perception
  • Speech
  • Photic Stimulation
  • Linguistics
  • Humans
  • Fixation, Ocular
  • Eye Movements
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Attention
  • 20 Language, Communication and Culture