Punctuation and Implicit Prosody in Silent Reading: An ERP Study Investigating English Garden-Path Sentences

Phrase Length Matters: The Interplay between Implicit Prosody and Syntax in Korean “Garden Path” Sentences

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_00001 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 23 (11) ◽

pp. 3555-3575 ◽

Cited By ~ 31

Author(s):

Hyekyung Hwang ◽

Karsten Steinhauer

Keyword(s):

Silent Reading ◽

Brain Response ◽

Theoretical Frameworks ◽

Garden Path ◽

Linguistic Evidence ◽

Subject Noun ◽

On Line ◽

The Subject ◽

Implicit Prosody ◽

Prosodic Boundary

In spoken language comprehension, syntactic parsing decisions interact with prosodic phrasing, which is directly affected by phrase length. Here we used ERPs to examine whether a similar effect holds for the on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading, as suggested by theories of “implicit prosody.” Ambiguous Korean sentence beginnings with two distinct interpretations were manipulated by increasing the length of sentence-initial subject noun phrases (NPs). As expected, only long NPs triggered an additional prosodic boundary reflected by a closure positive shift (CPS) in ERPs. When sentence materials further downstream disambiguated the initially dispreferred interpretation, the resulting P600 component reflecting processing difficulties (“garden path” effects) was smaller in amplitude for sentences with long NPs. Interestingly, additional prosodic revisions required only for the short subject disambiguated condition—the delayed insertion of an implicit prosodic boundary after the subject NP—were reflected by a frontal P600-like positivity, which may be interpreted in terms of a delayed CPS brain response. These data suggest that the subvocally generated prosodic boundary after the long subject NP facilitated the recovery from a garden path, thus primarily supporting one of two competing theoretical frameworks on implicit prosody. Our results underline the prosodic nature of the cognitive processes underlying phrase length effects and contribute cross-linguistic evidence regarding the on-line use of implicit prosody for parsing decisions in silent reading.

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Implicit prosody pulls its weight: Recovery from garden path sentences

10.21437/speechprosody.2016-43 ◽

2016 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jesse Harris ◽

Sun-Ah Jun ◽

Adam Royer

Keyword(s):

Garden Path ◽

Implicit Prosody

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Exploring the Similarity Between Implicit and Explicit Prosody: Prosodic Phrasing and Individual Differences

Language and Speech ◽

10.1177/0023830920972732 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 002383092097273

Author(s):

Jason Bishop

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Individual Differences ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Working Memory Capacity ◽

Silent Reading ◽

Memory Capacity ◽

Prosodic Phrasing ◽

Prosodic Phrase ◽

Implicit Prosody ◽

Implicit Prosody Hypothesis

In recent years, work carried out in the context of the implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH) has called into question the assumption that implicit (i.e., silently generated) prosody and explicit (overtly produced) prosody are similar in form. Focusing on prosodic phrasing, the present study explored this issue using an individual differences approach, and using methods that do not rely on the sentence comprehension tests characteristic of work within the IPH program. A large group of native English speakers participated in a production experiment intended to identify individual differences in average prosodic phrase length, phonologically defined. We then explored whether these (explicit) prosodic differences were related to two other kinds of variation, each with a connection to implicit prosody. First, we tested whether individual differences in explicit prosodic phrase length were predicted by individual differences in working memory capacity, a relationship that has been established for implicit prosody. Second, we explored whether participants’ explicit prosodic phrase lengths were predictive of their behavior in a silent-reading task in which they had to identify their own implicit prosodic groupings. In both cases, the findings are argued to be consistent with a similarity between explicit and implicit prosody. First, participants with higher working memory capacity (as estimated by reading spans) were associated with longer prosodic phrases. Second, participants who produced longer explicit prosodic phrases in speech tended to report generating longer prosodic phrases in silent reading. Implications for the nature of implicit prosody, and how it can be studied, are discussed.

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Event-Related Potential Evidence of Implicit Metric Structure during Silent Reading

Brain Sciences ◽

10.3390/brainsci9080192 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (8) ◽

pp. 192

Author(s):

Mara Breen ◽

Ahren B. Fitzroy ◽

Michelle Oraa Ali

Keyword(s):

Real Time ◽

Silent Reading ◽

Event Related Potentials ◽

Stress Pattern ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Related Potentials ◽

Implicit Prosody ◽

Prosodic Structures ◽

Implicit Prosody Hypothesis

Under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, readers generate prosodic structures during silent reading that can direct their real-time interpretations of the text. In the current study, we investigated the processing of implicit meter by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants read a series of 160 rhyming couplets, where the rhyme target was always a stress-alternating noun–verb homograph (e.g., permit, which is pronounced PERmit as a noun and perMIT as a verb). The target had a strong–weak or weak–strong stress pattern, which was either consistent or inconsistent with the stress expectation generated by the couplet. Inconsistent strong–weak targets elicited negativities between 80–155 ms and 325–375 ms relative to consistent strong–weak targets; inconsistent weak–strong targets elicited a positivity between 365–435 ms relative to consistent weak–strong targets. These results are largely consistent with effects of metric violations during listening, demonstrating that implicit prosodic representations are similar to explicit prosodic representations.

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Implicit prosody and contextual bias in silent reading

Journal of Eye Movement Research ◽

10.16910/jemr.6.2.4 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Kate McCurdy ◽

Gerrit Kentner ◽

Shravan Vasishth

Keyword(s):

Ambiguity Resolution ◽

Silent Reading ◽

Path Model ◽

Lexical Stress ◽

Syntactic Ambiguity ◽

Two Stage ◽

Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution ◽

First Pass ◽

Implicit Prosody ◽

Main Effects

Eye-movement research on implicit prosody has found effects of lexical stress on syntactic ambiguity resolution, suggesting that metrical well-formedness constraints interact with syntactic category assignment. Building on these findings, the present eyetracking study investigates whether contextual bias can modulate the effects of metrical structure on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent reading. Contextual bias and potential stress-clash in the ambiguous region were crossed in a 2 2 design. Participants read biased context sentences followed by temporarily ambiguous test sentences. In the three-word ambiguous region, main effects of lexical stress were dominant, while early effects of context were absent. Potential stress clash yielded a significant increase in first-pass regressions and re-reading probability across the three words. In the disambiguating region, the disambiguating word itself showed increased processing difficulty (lower skipping and increased re-reading probability) when the disambiguation engendered a stress clash configuration, while the word immediately following showed main effects of context in those same measures. Taken together, effects of lexical stress upon eye movements were swift and pervasive across first-pass and second-pass measures, while effects of context were relatively delayed. These results indicate a strong role for implicit meter in guiding parsing, one that appears insensitive to higher-level constraints. Our findings are problematic for two classes of models, the two-stage garden-path model and the constraint-based competition-integration model, but can be explained by a variation on the two-stage model, the unrestricted race model.

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