Intonational boundaries in sentence production and comprehension

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Edward Gibson will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on relations between intonational (or prosodic) phrasing and syntactic structure in sentence production and comprehension. This research asks where people tend to place intonational boundaries (pauses, roughly speaking) in producing sentences, and where people perceive such boundaries in sentences. The working hypothesis of the production experiments is that the probability of producing an intonational boundary at a given location is proportional to the sum of (1) the number of phonological phrases over which the most recently processed syntactic phrase extends, and (2) the number of phonological phrases over which the upcoming syntactic phrase extends, as long as it is not an argument of the most recently processed word. This and related hypotheses will be tested using analyses of natural speech corpora and a reader-listener paradigm. Participants in the reader-listener paradigm say sentences that they have read in advance. Other participants answer comprehension questions on the sentences after they are produced. The research also investigates whether preferences in comprehension mirror those in production. Methods for investigating comprehension will include complexity ratings, comprehension question accuracy, and cross-modal lexical decision. This project is important for several reasons. First, it will broaden our knowledge of the relationship between language and other aspects of human cognition, such as memory. The results of the work will also be of interest to researchers in computer speech generation and analysis, and language acquisition. Speech processing systems need to model human preferences in intonational boundary placement in order to both improve understanding of human speech and synthesize more natural sounding speech. With respect to language acquisition, it has been proposed that intonation can help learners acquire syntactic knowledge. Uncovering the relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure will help to evaluate whether such claims are viable.