Individual differences in prosodic strategies to sentence parsing

This study investigated individual differences in the use of prosodic structure in the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in English, exploring listeners’ sensitivity to the placement of prosodic boundaries in the parsing of relative clauses. Previous work, carried out in the context of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, has shown that variation in “autistic”like personality traits in neurotypical individuals predicts the use of prosody for this purpose, although this work utilized silently-read materials. In the current study, we investigated the comprehension of auditorily-presented sentences and found such traits to only weakly predict syntactic parsing. We propose that autistic traits primarily influence sensitivity to accentuation (rather than phrasing) in sentence processing, affecting sensitivity to prominence in terms of both pitch accent status as well as pitch accent realization.