Prosody in Spoken Language Processing

Studies of prosody and sentence processing have demonstrated that prosodic phrasing can exhibit strong effects on processing decisions in English. In this paper, we tested Korean sentence fragments containing syntactically ambiguous Adj-N1-N2 strings in a cross-modal naming task. Four accentual phrasing patterns were tested: (a) the default phrasing pattern, in which each word forms an accentual phrase; (b) a phrasing biased toward N1 modification; (c) a phrasing biased toward complex-NP modification; and (d) a phrasing used with adjective focus. Patterns (b) and (c) are disambiguating phrasings; the other two are commonly found with both interpretations and are thus ambiguous. The results showed that the naming time of items produced in the prosody contradicting the semantic grouping is significantly longer than that produced in either default or supporting prosody, We claim that, as in English, prosodic information in Korean is parsed into a well-formed prosodic representation during the early stages of processing. The partially constructed prosodic representation produces incremental effects on syntactic and semantic processing decisions and is retained in memory to influence reanalysis decisions.