• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.157-169
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• 2011

Compared to studies on prosodic effects on the comprehension of syntactic ambiguity in English, there are relatively few that investigated prosodic effects in East-Asian languages. This study examined the role of prosodic information in processing syntactically ambiguous sentences in Japanese. For syntactically ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses, this paper investigated whether prosodic information is immediately available during the process of these ambiguous sentences. Results from an auditory comprehension experiment with an on-line, cross-modal naming task seemingly suggest that contrary to the findings from the off-line study that examined the same constructions, prosodic information may not be immediately available to Japanese listeners. A possible account for failure to obtain effects of prosodic information is provided.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.153-161
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• 2014

The current study reports the results from a cross-modal naming experiment investigating the effects of a prosodic boundary location on the comprehension of ambiguous dative NPs in Korean (Yeongmi-ka Ceonghi-eykey norae-rul pwulecwu-n pwuin-ul ${\cdots}$). The underlined dative NP, Ceonghi-eykey, can temporarily be attached to the embedded rel-marked verb, pwulecwu-n ('sing-rel') or to the matrix verb to appear later. Participants heard sentence fragments manipulated for the location of Intonation Phrase boundary (the biggest prosodic boundary in the model of Seoul Korean) and right after that, had to name visually presented naming targets, which resolve the ambiguity of dative NPs. The prosodic manipulation did not result in difference in naming time, suggesting that the location of a prosodic boundary failed to influence the way Korean listeners interpreted ambiguous dative NPs. Possible reasons for the null effect were discussed.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.7-10
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• 2000

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.