Doctoral Dissertation Research: Processing Prosody and Syntax in Turkish

本研究探讨了韵律（语调和语音节奏）在土耳其语句法加工中的作用。许多实验表明，一个句子的韵律可以为听者提供其句法结构的线索；也有人观察到，不恰当的韵律轮廓会误导句法解析程序，造成理解困难。当韵律线索不支持句法结构时，语言处理机制会忽略韵律输入，而依赖于晚闭包等句法分析策略。然而，仔细观察现有的研究结果表明，短语的长度可能会导致默认句法策略的效果，因为众所周知，短语长度会影响韵律线索的感知信息。在本研究中，将进行四个实验来区分这些不同的解释。韵律的误导和促进作用将在土耳其语中进行研究，这种语言在类型化上不同于更常见的语言（如英语），并且具有非常适合这一目的的特性。在所有实验句子中，短语长度将被系统地操纵，这样，在一种情况下，最佳长度的韵律短语与晚闭句法有关，在另一种情况下，与早闭句法有关。本研究将对当前关于人类句子加工的心理机制的知识做出原创性的贡献。土耳其语的研究结果与之前研究的语言类似，这将加强韵律-语法相互作用是由人类解析机制的基本普遍特性指导的一般假设。具体的结果将解开两种可能的解释，即该机制如何对带有冲突线索的不完美输入做出反应，这在日常语言使用中并不罕见。其他潜在的贡献包括土耳其语文本到语音/语音到文本的软件开发，具有广泛的应用，包括帮助视障人士的程序。

This research investigates the role of prosody (intonation and rhythm of speech) in the processing of syntax in Turkish. Many experiments have shown that the prosody with which a sentence is uttered can provide listeners with cues to its syntactic structure; some have also observed that an inappropriate prosodic contour can mislead the syntactic parsing routines, causing comprehension difficulty. It has been proposed that when prosodic cues are not supportive of the syntactic structure, the language processing mechanism ignores the prosodic input and relies on syntactic parsing strategies such as Late Closure (a locality preference). However, a closer look at the available findings suggests that the lengths of phrases could have caused what appeared to be an effect of default syntactic strategies, since it is known that phrase lengths can influence the perceived informativeness of prosodic cues. In the present study, four experiments will be conducted to distinguish these alternative explanations. Misleading and facilitatory effects of prosody will be examined in Turkish, a language that is typologically different from more commonly studied languages (such as English) and has properties well-suited to this purpose. Phrase lengths will be systematically manipulated in all experimental sentences, such that optimal-length prosodic phrasing is associated with late closure syntax in one condition, and with early closure syntax in the other.This study will make an original contribution to current knowledge about the mental mechanisms underlying human sentence processing. Outcomes for Turkish similar to those for previously studied languages would strengthen the general hypothesis that prosody-syntax interactions are guided by fundamental universal properties of the human parsing mechanism. The specific results will disentangle two potential accounts of how that mechanism responds to imperfect input with conflicting cues, as is not uncommon in everyday language use. Other potential contributions include text-to-speech/speech-to-text software development in Turkish with a wide range of applications including programs to aid the visually handicapped.