The role of prosodic prominence in disambiguating word pairs

Abstract

This research tests the early incorporation of prosodic information during disambiguation of word pairs such as Packing cases. The word pair is ambiguous between a noun or verb phrase interpretation. However, the two interpretations are prosodically distinct. The current study presents the results of an on-line, cross-modal, response-time task suggesting that subjects can disambiguate these word pairs using differences in contrastive focus. A second experiment swapped the timing, f0, and amplitude of the noun phrase versions with the verb phrase versions. If prosodic information were guiding parsing, swapping the prosody of the alternatives should change subjects’ parses of the word-pairs. Indeed, the results of Experiment 2 confirmed that swapping the prosody of the word pairs reversed subjects’ parses of the word pairs. The findings presented here, therefore, provide strong evidence in favour of the on-line use of prosodic prominence in guiding interpretation.