The effects of prosodic information and visually presented context on language production and comprehension

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A series of eye-tracking visual world experiments examined(1) the effect of contrastive prosody(pitch expansion) and(2) structural priming, on the comprehension of an ambiguous branching structure in Japanese. In particular, we examined how contrast-evoking pitch expansion and structural priming interact with each other during online processing of globally ambiguous phrases such as "pink-Gen frog-Gen cap".A series of experiments revealed that an effect of syntactic priming was not further enhanced by contrastive prosody which would support the primed structural interpretation. Subsequent experiments showed that the contrastive pitch expansion which contradicts the contrastive relationship between the prime and target visual objects counteracted the LB priming, while it facilitated the RB priming. The results together demonstrated that prosodic cues interacted with syntactic priming in an interfering, as well as facilitatory, manner.