The influence of prosodic cues in sentence processing: a study of the NP1-VP-NP2-Attribute strucutre in BP

Abstract

Our study arose from questions about the ambiguity in syntactic constructions like NP1-V-NP2-attribute as in “The boy hugged the friend sweating”, which can happen in Brazilian Portuguese. This ambiguity refers to the ambiguous attachment of attribute, which can be locally attached to NP2 or non-locally to NP1. According to the principle Late Closure (FRAZIER, 1979) of the Garden Path Theory of Sentence Processing, the preference for local attachment is considered default, however, in accordance with Fodor (2002) changes in the prosodic pattern would to affect the syntactic sentences processing. For to check the influence of prosodic cues in the sentence syntactic interpretation with the structure NP1-V-NP2- Attribute, we used “monitored” erception tests which were done with the DMDX software by manipulating the prosody of the test sentences in four situations: F0 raise, vowel lengthening, silent pause and neutral reading. We expected that the prosodic cues manipulation in the sentence input would direct listeners’ preference to non-local attachment and find out that F0 raise was the most remarkable cue to listeners’ interpretation. When the prosody was not emphatic, it seems that the structure processing is only Good Enough as proposed by Ferreira et al. (2002, 2007)