ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004

Prosodic disambiguation of participle constructions in English

Soyoung Kang, Shari R. Speer

We report the results of one written and one auditory study that examined prosodic effects on resolving the ambiguity of participle constructions in English (e.g., Aaron followed a poor guy drinking his soda). These participle constructions behave similarly to the ambiguous prepositional phrases that can be attached to the verb phrase or to the immediately preceding noun. In the literature, the prosodic effects on resolving PP ambiguity have been controversial. However, the results from the current experiment extend and confirm the previous findings that demonstrated the effect of prosodic boundaries on resolving this type of syntactic ambiguity.