Conference on The Role of Prosody in Sentence Parsing, Tucson, Arizona-March 1995

9422153这笔拨款将用于支持将于1995年3月在亚利桑那大学举行的第八届纽约市立大学句子处理年会上关于“韵律在句子解析中的作用”的特别会议。直到最近，大多数的句子处理研究都使用了视觉刺激，部分原因是这使得它有可能将输入时间锁定在受试者的反应上。但最近，随着计算机和语音编辑软件容量的增加和价格的降低，研究人员开始研究韵律在处理听觉呈现的句子过程中的作用。这一新的研究浪潮规避了视觉呈现刺激中的一个普遍担忧：语言的正字法表征不能充分代表语音的许多非片段特性，显然，语音是人类语言的更自然的形态。直觉上，韵律线索——音节的音高、幅度和持续时间的变化以及停顿长度的变化——应该对听众有用。他们是否真的是一个实证问题，许多研究人员目前正在调查。这次城市大学句子处理会议的特别会议的目的是将研究韵律对句子解析的在线影响的研究人员聚集在一起，展示和综合最近的结果，并提出争议点。我们打算将这些论文作为《心理语言学研究杂志》特刊的一部分或成书发表。

9422153 This grant will support a special session on "The Role of Prosody in Sentence Parsing" at the Eighth Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, to be held at the University of Arizona in March, 1995. Up until recently, by far the majority of sentence-processing research has used visual presentation of stimuli, in part because this makes it possible to timelock the input to the subject's response. But more recently, as computers and speech editing software have increased in capacity and reduced in price, researchers have begun to examine the role of prosody during the processing of auditorily-presented sentences. This new wave of research circumvents a common worry in visually-presented stimuli: orthographic representations of language do not adequately represent many of the non-segmental properties of speech and, obviously, speech is the more natural modality for human language. Intuitively, prosodic cues--changes in the pitch, amplitude and duration of syllables and changes in pause length--should be useful to listeners. Whether they actually are is an empirical question which a number of researchers are currently investigating. The goal of this special session of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference is to bring together researchers who are studying the on-line effects of prosody on sentence parsing to present and synthesize recent results, and to raise points of controversy. We intend to publish these papers as part of either a special issue of the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research or a book.