The resolution of the clause that is relative?Prosody and plausibility as cues to RC attachment inEnglish: evidence from structural priming and event relatedpotentials

BF Psychology

Zahn, Daniela ; Christoph, Scheepers

University:University of Glasgow

Department:Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology

关键词: Prosody, Plausibility, RC attachment, Structural Priming, Event-related Potentials;   

Others  :  http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5163/7/2014ZahnPhD.pdf

来源: University of Glasgow

【 摘 要 】

In spoken language, different types of linguistic information are used by the parser to arrive at a coherent syntactic interpretation of the input.In this thesis I investigated two of these information sources, namely overt prosodic features and plausibility constraints. More specifically, I was interested in how these cues interact in resolving the relative clauseattachment ambiguity.Much research has explored the single cues and much is know about the influence that each cue exerts independent of the other. However, the interaction of prosodic and semantic cues to attachment has to date received little attention.Two experimental paradigms were used in 4 experiments, i.e. the method of structural priming and the online method of event‐related potentials.The data from these experiments suggest that the cues interact in a complex way. The results imply that the prominence of the dispreferred cues, the surprisal and the type of revision associated with them play a major roleduring processing. I propose three processing principles that might account for the results observed.