Accents & Syntactic Attachment: Exploring how pitch accents affect the resolution

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目旨在帮助更好地理解语言韵律（而不是情感或情绪韵律）对句子处理的影响。特别地，它探讨了音高重音对句法歧义句子的影响。众所周知，韵律边界是英语两大韵律单位之一，它会影响歧义短语的连接。另一方面，音高重音通常被认为只影响句子的语义和话语表征，通过标记给定的、新的和对比的信息。本研究探讨了音调重音可以吸引依恋的假设，特别是在最近的依恋位点之后存在韵律边界的情况下。一系列的听觉实验将探讨在三种不同的句法结构中，在有和没有支持性韵律边界的情况下，重音对依恋的影响。接下来的实验将把句子放在语境中，以检验前一个问题所传达的焦点是否也能吸引依恋，以及当口音与之前的语境形成鲜明对比时，它们是否仍能提供依恋的信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of linguistic prosody (as opposed to affective or emotional prosody) on sentence processing. In particular, it explores the effects of pitch accents on syntactically ambiguous sentences. It is well-known that prosodic boundaries, one of the two major prosodic units in English, can affect the attachment of ambiguous phrases. Pitch accents, on the other hand, are usually thought to influence only semantic and discourse representations of a sentence, by marking given vs. new vs. contrastive information. This research explores the hypothesis that pitch accents can attract attachment, especially in the presence of a prosodic boundary after the nearest attachment site. A series of auditory experiments will explore accent effects on attachment in three different syntactic structures, with and without supportive prosodic boundaries. Following experiments will place the sentences in contexts to examine whether the focus conveyed by a preceding question can also attract attachment and whether accents remain informative for attachment when they clearly contrast with prior context.