What does prosody tell us about relative clause attachments in German?

Overt prosody and plausibility as cues to relative-clause attachment in English spoken sentences

We investigated the interplay between overt prosodic cues and semantic cues on the structural interpretation of spoken sentences that permit either highor low-attachment of a final relative clause. Prosodic cues were manipulated via the presence or absence of a strong prosodic boundary before the relative clause, and semantic cues were induced via plausibility restrictions (e.g., the servant of...

The structure-prosody interface of restrictive and appositive relative clauses in Dutch and German

This paper reports a study on the structure-prosody interface of embedded restrictive and appositive relative clauses in Dutch and German. The first restrict the class to which the antecedent in the main clause refers, whereas the latter denote an additional property of the antecedent. How this difference is reflected in prosody is topic of investigation. For both languages a perception experim...

Social Integration of Young Canadians: What Do Types of Attachment Tell Us?

The implicit prosody of Jabberwocky and the relative clause attachment riddle

This contribution reports on three sentence processing experiments involving structurally ambiguous Jabberwocky strings. The items are complex NPs, in which a relative clause can be attached to either of two nominal heads (NP1-preposition-NP2-RC). The phonological lengths of the heads, as well as that of the relative clause, are manipulated. The results show modest effects on relative clause at...

Priming Implicit Prosody: Prosodic Boundaries and Individual Differences.

Using the structural priming paradigm, the present study explores predictions made by the implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH) by testing whether an implicit prosodic boundary generated from a silently read sentence influences attachment preference for a novel, subsequently read sentence. Results indicate that such priming does occur, as evidenced by an effect on relative clause attachment. In par...