Read mathematical formulae (MF) provide an ideal and littlestudied window into speakers' ability to prosodically disambiguate complex NPs. An experiment investigating whether and how speakers of different mathematical skill levels prosodically mark English utterances containing ambiguities caused by the application of unary and binary mathematical operators found that speakers consistently mark intended syntactic parses with cooperating prosody, whereby placement of relatively weaker prosodic breaks indicated tighter syntactic grouping and stronger breaks indicated looser syntactic grouping. When prosodic breaks were of equal strength, absolute break strength often indicated the desired parse. Use of cooperating prosody correlated significantly with correctly evaluating MF, and increased mathematical ability correlated with decreased use of conflicting (noncooperating) prosodic contours.

Index Terms: speech prosody, relative boundary hypothesis, break strength, prosody of mathematics