Prosody in parsing

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Frank Kügler
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2006 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 25022702

In this project, we will study the processing of prosody in its relationship with phonetics, syn-tax and psycholinguistics. In the past, research on speech processing has concentrated mainly on word order, argument structure, syntactic attachment and segmental phonology. The time is ripe to investigate less understood elements of grammar in more detail, and prosody is an ideal candidate for such an undertaking. Our general assumption is that pros-ody feeds parsing, in the same way that other components of grammar do. If syntax and/or semantics is ambiguous, the prosodic structure may provide crucial cues for the decision be-tween equally plausible options. For this reason, and given that spoken speech is replete with locally or globally ambiguous structures, prosodic phrasing can be considered the im-mediate underlying cause of highly efficient speech processing. The ultimate goal of the pro-ject is to either integrate prosody into existing models of speech processing or, if this goal turns out to be unrealistic, to elaborate a model of speech processing with a strong prosodic component. Examining the perception of prosody requires a good understanding of its production. Thus we will complement our studies on processing by an examination of production in areas which are relevant for our concerns: formation of prosodic domains, pitch excursions, realiza-tions of phrasal boundaries, etc. These studies will address the role of acoustically realized prosody, like changes of phrasing and displacements of pitch accents. We will conduct a series of experiments to study the interaction of prosodic phrasing with syntax and other grammatical components. Some of them will target `silent¿ prosody. We hy-pothesize that a default prosodic structure is projected onto silently read utterances, except when the context provides cues for a more marked one. Garden-path sentences arise in si-lent reading because unmarked prosody and syntax are first projected on the beginning of a sentence which turn out to be incompatible with the rest of the sentence. This results in a cognitively costly reanalysis of prosody and syntax. The same holds for other kinds of sen-tences which have been shown to receive an increased reading time or reduced acceptabil-ity. In order to disentangle the role of language dependent factors and universal factors, we will ground our project on a comparison between at least German and Hindi, two languages with different word order and different prosodic structures. Ideally, our research will extend to other languages in the second phase of the project.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1234: Phonological and Phonetic Competence: Between Grammar, Signal Processing and Neural Activity
• Participating Persons: Professorin Dr. Caroline Féry; Professor Dr. Shravan Vasishth