Using prosody to predict the end of sentences in English and French: Normal and brain-damaged subjects
Using prosody to predict the end of sentences in English and French: Normal and brain-damaged subjects
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DOI：
10.1080/016909696387231
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发表时间：
1996-02-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Hirt, C
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Grosjean, F;Hirt, C
在早期的一项研究中（Grosjean，1983），人们发现，英语听众在预测一个句子的时间结束时，只给出了“潜在的最后一个词”的部分，这是一个名词，在一个可选的介词短语的长度不同。本研究在四个实验中研究了这一现象。前两个实验考察了听众的预测能力时，提出了整个句子的持续时间增加的片段，并提出了潜在的最后一个词。结果表明，能够使用韵律预测句子的结尾正确，科目必须达到一个点，在句子中，无论是语法还是语义都不能有助于预测过程。第三个实验研究了用英语获得的结果是否可以在法语中复制，法语是一种具有非常不同的韵律结构的语言。研究发现，与英语听力者不同，法语听力者无法区分句子的连续性，尽管他们可以分辨句子是否结束。最后，第四个实验研究了左半球和右半球脑损伤（LHD，RHD）患者在估计句子长度方面是否同样熟练。LHD患者表现得像他们的控制，但RHD患者经历了很大的困难，做这项任务。这证实了句子韵律很可能涉及右半球，特别是当不涉及其他类型的语言处理时。这些研究的扩展到其他类型的语言材料和其他语言进行了讨论，因为是在线使用的预测语言处理。
In an earlier study (Grosjean, 1983), it was found that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the ''potentially last word'', that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. The present study investigated this phenomenon in four experiments. The first two experiments examined the prediction capabilities of listeners when presented with the whole sentence in segments of increasing duration and when presented with the potentially last word only. The results indicate that to be able to use prosody to predict the end of sentences correctly, subjects must have reached a point in the sentence where neither syntax nor semantics can contribute to the prediction process. The third experiment investigated whether the results obtained with English can be replicated in French, a language with a very different prosodic structure. It was found that unlike their English counterparts, French listeners were unable to differentiate between sentences that continued, although they could tell if a sentence ended or not. Finally, the fourth experiment examined whether left and right hemisphere brain-damaged (LHD, RHD) patients are equally proficient at estimating the length of a sentence. LHD patients behaved like their controls, but RHD patients experienced great difficulty doing the task. This confirms that sentence prosody may well involve the right hemisphere, especially when no other type of linguistic processing is involved. The extension of these studies to other types of linguistic material and to other languages is discussed, as is the on-line use of prediction in language processing.