Immediate use of contextually meaningful prosodic information in processing of garden-path sentences

概要

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An eye-tracking experiment examined whether prosodic information can be immediately used to predict and analyze a correct sentence structure in processing of structurally ambiguous sentences in Japanese such as Otokonoko-ga sanrinsha-ni notteiru onnanoko-wo mitsumeta ('The boy stared at the girl who was riding on the tricycle'). In our experiment, participants heard such a sentence either with contrastive intonation on the RC-theme (tricycle) or without. At the same time, they saw a visual scene that contained either an object that established contrast to the RC-head noun (e.g., another girl riding on a hobbyhorse) or an object that did not (e.g., a woman riding on a bicycle). The results showed that when a visual scene include contrast, participants made more looks to the correct RC-head object with contrastive intonation than without the intonation. However, when a scene did not include contrast, there was no difference in looks to the RC-head object between a sentence with the intonation and the one without. The results demonstrated that prosodic information can help listeners to analyze a correct syntactic structure before encountering any disambiguating information but this is limited to when the prosodic information is contextually meaningful.
2011-07-29