Prosodic planning while reading aloud: on-line examination of Japanese sentences.

In this paper, we discuss the process of generating prosody on-line while reading a sentence orally. We report results from two studies in which eye-voice span was measured while subjects read aloud. In study one, the average eye-voice span for simple texts was only about 2.5 characters. In study two, the eye-voice span was also about 2.5 characters even when the subjects read garden-path sentences which required reanalysis during processing. That the readers looked only a few characters ahead before reading aloud suggests that the prosody which they generate is not based on a global syntactic analysis, but instead reflects only limited, local syntactic information. The subjects, therefore, make errors and repairs when this locally determined prosody obviously contradicts the meaning of the sentence.

Duke Scholars

Author Reiko Mazuka Psychology & Neuroscience