Paper Info
Title
Effects of prosodic boundaries on ambiguous syntactic clause boundaries in Japanese
Abstract
We report the results of experiments designed to in vestigate the effects of prosodic boundaries on resolving amb iguous syntactic clause boundaries in Japanese. The head- final, pro - drop nature of this language generates abundant syn tactic attachment ambiguity for sentences that contain rel ative clauses. Two types of sentences with differing head nouns modified by relative clauses were examined. Syntac tic attachment preferences for these two types of sente nces in the absence of overt prosody were assessed in a written study. Results indicated that readers retrieved one clear meaning for one type whereas ambiguity was not clearly resolved for the other type. A sentence comprehension study was conducted using auditory versions of both sentence types, eac h produced with two prosodic structures. Results demonstrated the crucial use of prosodic boundary information in retrieving syntactic clause boundary information. Most importantly, pros odic boundaries affected the way listeners posited empty pronouns for the subject of main or subordinate predicates. These results demonstrated the fundamental importance of prosodic phrasal structure to the assignment of syntactic constituen cy during sentence comprehension, particularly in the case of a head- final, pro -drop language.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2004
INTERSPEECH
experience design,noun
Field
DocType
Citations 
Prosody,Computer science,Non-finite clause,Noun,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Dependent clause,Predicate (grammar),Sentence,Ambiguity,Syntax,Linguistics
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shari R. Speer142.84
So-Young Kang200.68