Intonational boundaries in sentence production and comprehension

在国家科学基金会的支持下，爱德华·吉布森博士将进行为期三年的心理语言学研究，研究语调(或韵律)短语和句法结构在句子产生和理解中的关系。这项研究询问人们在造句子时倾向于在哪里设置语调界限(粗略地说，停顿)，以及人们在句子中感觉到这种界限的地方。生产实验的工作假设是，在给定位置产生语调边界的概率与(1)最近处理的句法短语延伸到其上的语音短语的数量和(2)即将到来的句法短语延伸到其上的语音短语的数量之和成比例，只要它不是最近处理的单词的论元。这一假设和相关假设将通过对自然语音语料库和读者-听者范式的分析来检验。读者-听者范式的参与者说出他们事先读过的句子。其他参与者在句子产生后回答理解问题。这项研究还调查了理解偏好是否反映了生产偏好。研究理解的方法将包括复杂性评分、理解问题的准确性和跨模式词汇决定。这个项目很重要，有几个原因。首先，它将拓宽我们对语言和人类认知的其他方面之间的关系的认识，比如记忆。这项工作的结果也将对计算机语音生成和分析以及语言习得的研究人员感兴趣。语音处理系统需要在语调边界放置中对人的偏好进行建模，以便既提高对人类语音的理解，又合成更自然的语音。在语言习得方面，有人提出语调可以帮助学习者习得句法知识。揭示语调短语和句法结构之间的关系将有助于评估这种说法是否可行。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Edward Gibson will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on relations between intonational (or prosodic) phrasing and syntactic structure in sentence production and comprehension. This research asks where people tend to place intonational boundaries (pauses, roughly speaking) in producing sentences, and where people perceive such boundaries in sentences. The working hypothesis of the production experiments is that the probability of producing an intonational boundary at a given location is proportional to the sum of (1) the number of phonological phrases over which the most recently processed syntactic phrase extends, and (2) the number of phonological phrases over which the upcoming syntactic phrase extends, as long as it is not an argument of the most recently processed word. This and related hypotheses will be tested using analyses of natural speech corpora and a reader-listener paradigm. Participants in the reader-listener paradigm say sentences that they have read in advance. Other participants answer comprehension questions on the sentences after they are produced. The research also investigates whether preferences in comprehension mirror those in production. Methods for investigating comprehension will include complexity ratings, comprehension question accuracy, and cross-modal lexical decision.This project is important for several reasons. First, it will broaden our knowledge of the relationship between language and other aspects of human cognition, such as memory. The results of the work will also be of interest to researchers in computer speech generation and analysis, and language acquisition. Speech processing systems need to model human preferences in intonational boundary placement in order to both improve understanding of human speech and synthesize more natural sounding speech. With respect to language acquisition, it has been proposed that intonation can help learners acquire syntactic knowledge. Uncovering the relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure will help to evaluate whether such claims are viable.