Prosodic Effects in Minimal Attachment · PROSODIC EFFECTS IN MINIMAL AlTACHMENT 75 Holmes,...

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1992,45A (1) 73-87

Prosodic Effects in Minimal Attachment

W .D. Marslen-Wilson MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, U. K .

L.K. Tyler, P. Warren, P. Grenier, and C.S. Lee Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, U. K .

This experiment explores the role of prosodic cues in resolving temporary morphosyntactic ambiguities in spoken language comprehension. Using a cross-modal naming task, we find that prosodic cues are as effective as overt lexical cues in controlling how the listener resolves attachment ambiguities. This suggests that prosodic factors can affect the early stages of parsing and interpretation.

There is no dispute that the comprehension of spoken language involves the use of different types of linguistic information-syntactic, semantic, lexical, prosodic. What is less clear is when and how these different types of information are used in the comprehension process. In this paper we focus on prosodic information, and ask whether it is used to constrain the immediate structural interpretation of an utterance.

One view of the comprehension process is that it involves the immediate integration of various types of linguistic information as they become available. There is considerable experimental support for this view. A number of studies (e.g. Grosjean, 1980; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980; Marslen- Wilson, Tyler, & Seidenberg, 1978; Swinney, Zurif, & Cutler, 1980; Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1977) have shown that syntactic and semantic information is used on-line to determine the immediate interpretation of an utterance. Marslen-Wilson and Tyler (1980), for example, found that target words in normal utterances and in utterances that were grammatically well

Requests for reprints should be addressed to William Marslen-Wilson. Birkbeck College, Department of Psychology, Malet Street, London WClE 7HX.

This experiment was carried out as an undergraduate project in the University of Cambridge Department of Experimental Psychology by P. Grenier and C.S. Lee under the supervision of the first three authors. The order of the first three authors is alphabetical.

0 1992 The Experimental Psychology Society

74 MARSLEN-WILSON ET AL.

formed but meaningless were detected more rapidly, the later they occurred in the utterance. This contrasted with the speed to detect targets in random strings of words, which remained stable across the string. This pattern, and the finding of an advantage of meaningful over meaningless strings, suggests that as each word is heard, syntactic and semantic information accumulates and is used to develop structural representations of utterances. It is this developing representation that facilitates monitoring latencies as more of the utterance is heard.

The contribution of prosodic information to the on-line interpretation of an utterance has received much less attention than the contribution of either syntactic or semantic information. However, some research has shown that prosody is used immediately in the on-line interpretation process. For example, Tyler and Warren (1987) found that when the prosodic well-formedness of a spoken utterance was disrupted, listeners’ ability to process the utterance was adversely affected. The authors interpreted this as showing that prosody maintains an overall cohesion across an utterance, even when it is semantically anomalous.

In this paper we look more specifically at the role of prosody by examining the on-line effects of prosodic cues on the assignment of structural relations. To do this, we exploit previous research by Frazier and her colleagues (Frazier, 1978; Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983; Rayner & Frazier, 1987) on certain “default” parsing strategies. These are considered to be obligatory syntactic processes that apply at the earliest stages of parsing and interpretation. One such strategy, which we will focus on here, is that of minimal attachment (MA). According to the strategy of minimal attachment, each incoming word is attached to the developing phrase structure such that the fewest possible additional nodes are constructed. Consider, for example, sentences l a and lb:

l a Karen knew the schedule by heart. 1 b Karen knew the schedule was wrong.

The interpretation of the phrase the schedule will require the construc- tion of a single NP node if the schedule is the direct object of knew (as in la). This is an example of minimal attachment. However, an additional sentence node will have to be constructed above the NP if the schedule is the subject of a complement clause (as in lb). This is an example of non-minimal attachment. In eye-movement studies, using materials like l a and lb, Frazier and Rayner (1982; Rayner & Frazier, 1987) found longer reading times (as measured by eye fixation durations) in cases where the ambiguity was resolved into a non-minimal attachment structure compared to when the correct structure involved minimal attachment. This was taken as evidence that minimal attachment is a psychologically valid parsing strategy.

PROSODIC EFFECTS IN MINIMAL AlTACHMENT 75

Holmes, Kennedy, and Murray (1987; Holmes & Kennedy, 1983) tested a further prediction that arises from the minimal attachment strategy, namely that in sentences like 2a and 2b below, the phrase was a real insult should take no longer to process in 2b than in 2a, because of the presence of the disambiguating complementizer that in 2a. When the complementizer is absent, the minimal attachment strategy results in the noun phrase the last offer from the management being interpreted as direct object of considered. This results in a reanalysis once the complement verb phrase is encountered. In contrast, no reanalysis is required in sentences like 2c, where minimal atachment gives the correct reading of the ambiguous string.

2a (NMA) The workers considered that the last offer from the management was a real insult.

2b (NMA) The workers considered the last offer from the management was a real insult.

2c (MA) The workers considered the last offer from the management of the .factory.

Holmes et al. (1987) found in a self-paced reading task that there was no effect of the presence or absence of the explicit complementizer, which is contrary to the claim that minimal attachment is the default parsing strategy. Rayner and Frazier (1987), however, claim that the reason for this was that comprehension times are relatively long in self-paced reading and may be affected by processing operations subsequent to the early obligatory application of a minimal attachment strategy. They therefore used the same materials in an eye-movement study, where they did find an advantage for the minimal attachment version of those sentences, as well as showing an effect of the overt complementizer.'

The question we ask in this paper, using similar materials, is whether parsing strategies such as minimal attachment, which are supposed to determine the initial structural description of the sentence, can be affected by prosody. In this way we address the wider issue of whether prosodic information plays a role in the immediate interpretation of an utterance.

Before we can ask this question, we have to be sure that speakers produce different syntactic structures with potentially disambiguating prosody. Previous research shows that speakers do vary duration and pitch appropriately (Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980; Cooper & Sorenson, 1981 ; Warren, 1985). For example, Warren (1985) examined the acoustic properties of sentence pairs involving attachment ambiguities similar to those used by Frazier and her colleagues. Examples such as those given in 3

'This issue is by no means closed; a recent paper by Kennedy, Murray, Jennings, and Reid (1989) suggests that the difference between the Holmes et al. (1987) and the Rayner and Frazier (1987) results cannot be attributed simply to the different tasks being used.


below showed consistent lengthening of the verb immediately preceding the point of attachment ambiguity (learnt in the example in 3), together with a stronger tendency to pausing after that verb. In addition, the patterning of fundamental frequency (FO), an important component of per- ceived pitch, took the form of a continuing declination across verb and noun phrase in the minimal attachment cases, as opposed to a sharp fall on the verb (learnt) in the non-minimal attachment reading, accompanied by a step up in FO to the following noun phrase.

3a The actor learnt the text and knew his role. 3b The actor learnt the text and amused the cast.

Warren (1985) showed that subjects could use this prosodic information to assign the appropriate structure to incomplete sentences (such as 3a or 3b, presented up to text). Earlier experimental work by Lehiste (1973; Lehiste, Olive, & Streeter, 1976) has pointed to the importance of durational information as a cue to the structural analysis of ambiguous strings, such as There are old men and women [pitch was less important (Streeter, 1978), and amplitude even less so]. These findings were developed further by Scott (1982), who claimed that durational variation is used indirectly, via its effect on the rhythmic grouping of constituents, rather than as a direct local cue. The suggestion that prosodic effects on interpretation are to be explained in terms of prosodic structural organization is supported by Nespor and Vogel (1983), who found that a prosodic hierarchical structure (defined in terms of metrical phonology) is a better predictor of disambiguation than a syntactic one.

There are, therefore, several earlier studies that suggest that prosodic information is used to guide the assignment of syntactic structure. All of these studies, however, use off-line tests of comprehension, which limits what they can tell us about when and how such prosodic information is used. Can it be used to determine the “first-pass’’ analysis of the utterance, as opposed to some later post-perceptual analysis? To answer this, we need to use a task that taps more directly the immediate analysis being carried out by the listener. The experiment we present below uses spoken materials in such a task.

EXPERIMENT

If we are right in our basic claim that subjects use whatever information is available in order to develop their on-line interpretation of the input, and if spoken sentences contain relevant additional information in the prosodic contour, then the sentences should be disambiguated as soon as the prosodic information becomes available and without waiting for further morphosyntactic information. To test these claims, the current experiment

PROSODIC EFFECTS IN MINIMAL ATTACHMENT 77

uses minimal attachment sentences based on those used by Holmes et al. (1987) and Rayner and Frazier (1987). We ask, in particular, whether the presence of appropriate prosodic cues will resolve the ambiguity in sentences such as 2b, repeated below, much as the complementizer resolves it in 2a.

2a The workers considered that the last offer from the management

2b The workers considered the last offer from the management was

The on-line task we use to test this hypothesis is cross-modal naming, as previously used by Tyler and Marslen-Wilson (1977, 1982). In this task, subjects are required to name a visual probe that stands in a controlled relationship to an immediately preceding auditory input. The naming latencies to the visual probe are affected by the syntactic andor semantic appropriateness of the probe as a continuation of the preceding auditory materials. Here we measure latencies as a function of the appropriateness of the probe relative to the structure marked by the prosodic contour.

Sentence sets such as 2a and 2b are presented auditorily up to the end of the third noun phrase (i.e. to management in 2). The following verb (WAS) is then presented as the visual probe for repetition. In the case of 2a, the presence of the overt complementizer will prevent the application of minimal attachment, so that WAS will be responded to as an appropriate continuation. For 2b the prediction is that the prosodic contour over the sentence will also ensure the non-minimal attachment reading. If this is not the case, then sentences such as 2b should result in longer naming latencies than 2a, because minimal attachment will operate and result in an anomalous continuation.

Performance on these two sentences can be contrasted with the minimal attachment sentence (2c, below). If this is presented in the same way, up to and including management, and followed by the same visual probe WAS, then the prosodic contour marking minimal attachment (together with any minimal attachment strategy) conflicts with the probe-word continuation, which is compatible only with non-minimal attachment.

2c The workers considered the last offer from the management of the

In summary, if prosody has its hypothesized function, then responses should be slower for the third version of these sentences than for the other two, which should not differ. But if prosody does not affect the assignment of the initial structure, then sentences like 2b, without the overt complementizer, should be just as disrupted as sentences like 2c, as they both would be interpreted as minimal-attachment sentences and as such would

was a real insult.

a real insult.

factory.


be incompatible with the visual probe word. Response latencies for both would be longer than in 2a.'

We also include a fourth condition, in which the anomaly of the continuation word is unambiguously determined by the syntactic organization of the utterance and independently of any prosodic variables. For the current set of examples, this target word was WERE, a plural verb f@!lowing a singular noun phrase in subject position, as in 2d below:

2d The workers considered that the last offer from the

This is the same spoken sentence as in (2a), where the presence of the overt complementizer means that the utterance is structurally unambiguous at the point when the target word is presented. Note that responses to WERE (and similar violations of number agreement) will only be disrupted if the subjects are relating the target to a syntactically organized representation of the preceding auditory input, as it is only relative to such a representation that appropriate number agreement can be established. The reason for including this fourth condition is to provide a comparison with the other three test conditions and to allow us to check (in the event of a null result for these three conditions) that the paradigm is indeed sensitive to the way the previous material has been syntactically parsed.

Finally, a crucial factor in naming experiments is the fact that response times to different words vary as a function not just of the contexts in which we place them, but also of their own properties (lexical frequency, length, phonetic and orthographic make-up, etc.), as well as each subject's base naming response time. For this reason we had a fifth condition, in which the target words from the main experiment were named after a simple carrier phrase. This provides us with baseline naming times for each of the target words for each subject. Any difference from this baseline can then be attributed to the conditions of the experiment.

management. . .

Method

Materials and Design. The 24 sets of stimuli used in this experiment are based on Rayner and Frazier (1987). Two sentences were changed in ways not critical to the predictions of the experiment, in order to make

'In addition to the three MA and NMA conditions we use here, Rayner and Frazier (1987) included a version of the non-minimal attachment sentence with a non-finite complement (e.g.: . . . considered the last offer from the management to be . . .). This was because they were concerned that a subgroup of Holmes et a1.k materials seemed slightly odd with a tensed complement. Their results show essentially the same pattern in first-pass reading data for all tensed and non-tensed complement versions, with a difference for their "odd" subgroup appearing only in second-pass reading times. We do not include the non-finite versions in our experiment.


them more suitable for British subjects. In addition, in one sentence the verb used in our experiment as the naming target was the word was instead of the original two words had been. This did not affect the well-formedness of the sentence. (The full set of sentences used is given in the Appendix.)

Four experimental versions of each sentence were prepared, as inTable 1; non-minimal attachment prosody with an overt complementizer (NMA+Comp), non-minimal attachment prosody without the complementizer (NMA-Comp), minimal attachment prosody (MA) also without the complementizer, and anomalous on the basis of number-agreement violations (NUM). In the examples in Table 1, the capitalized word is the visual probe presented at the offset of the auditory fragment.

The recordings used for the NMA+Comp version and the NUM version were identical, so that three versions of each sentence set were needed for the auditory primes. Each sentence set had two target words: the word appropriate to the NMA cases, which was also the target for the MA version, and an inappropriate target, used in the NUM condition. In total, seven different targets were used across the 24 stimulus sets (was, would, had, have, were, has, is). These were also tested in the base-line condition, using the neutral carrier phrase “The fofZowing word is”.

The 24 sets of test sentences were recorded by a female native speaker of English at a normal conversational rate. In addition, 70 filler and 24 practice sentences were recorded. These included sentences with different syntactic structures and target items of different form classes, so as to disguise the regularities of the test items.

The recordings were digitized and stored on computer disc. A speech editor was used to locate splice points for each sentence. The splice point corresponded to the end of the word that completed the subject noun phrase in the NMA cases. Note that the equivalent point was used in the MA case, although this was not the end of the object noun phrase. In fact, it was important that it should not be, because otherwise the last words would bear a constituent-final prosody, which would have been an additional cue, but not the one we were interested in at the point of attachment.

The four test versions of the materials were counterbalanced such that each contained 6 instances of each of the 4 test conditions, and so that

TABLE 1

NMA+Comp

NMA-Comp

MA

NUM

The workers considered that the last offer from the management WAS

The workers considered the last offer from the management WAS

The workers considered the last offer from the management WAS

The workers considered that the last offer from the management WERE


each version contained only one member of each stimulus set. The 24 practice and 70 filler items were common to each version, as were 5 presen- tations of each of the 7 targets in the base-line condition, which followed the main test sequence. The total list of the base-line targets was ran- domized and preceded by 5 warm-up tokens.

Procedure. Subjects were seated in a sound-attenuated booth and wore a combination headphone-microphone headset. They were told that they would hear sentence fragments over the headphones. Immediately at the end of the fragment they would see a single word on a screen in front of them. Their task was two-fold. (1) They had to name the visual probe as quickly as possible. (2) They should indicate on a score sheet, on a scale of 0 to 10, whether they thought the probe word was a good (10 on the scale) or bad (0 on the scale) continuation of what they had heard. This second task was designed to ensure that subjects attended to the auditory prime. It also served as an independent measure of the appropriateness of the visual words as continuations (cf. Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1977).

The experiment was under the control of a mini-computer, which played out the prime fragments and cued slave workstations to present the visual probe to the subjects. The subjects’ vocal responses triggered independent voice keys, each of which was linked to a digital timer in the control computer. The control computer kept a record of subjects’ response times for later analysis. The appropriateness scores were assessed separately.

During the initial practice sequence of 24 items the experimenters could adjust the trigger levels of the voice keys to allow for individual variation in loudness, etc. The subjects were then tested on the main body of test and filler items. Following this, the nature of the base-line items was explained, and subjects then completed the base-line condition. During the whole sequence, the experimenters either monitored the subjects’ responses to ensure they were making the correct naming response or recorded the responses onto tape for subsequent checking before the results were analysed. The complete testing session lasted between 25 and 30 minutes.

Subjects. Forty subjects from the MRC Language and Speech Group subject pool took part in the experiment, 10 for each of the four test lists. Three further subjects were replaced, due to large numbers of inaccurate and slow responses.

Results and Discussion

On the basis of the overall distribution of response latencies, repetition times over 1 sec were excluded from the overall analysis. Together with missing data and erroneous repetitions, this accounted for 3.1% of the


total possible responses. The remaining data were used to compute mid- mean reaction times for every subject and item in each condition. Differ- ence scores were then computed by subtracting mid-mean latencies for test conditions from the mid-mean latencies for the same word produced after the neutral carrier-phrase. Table 2 shows the raw and difference scores for the four conditions.

Both sets of data (raw and difference) were entered into subject (Fl) and item (F2) analyses-of-variance, and resulting F-values combined in the minF' statistic. The ANOVAs were in each case a one-way analysis, with four levels of a single variable: NMA+Comp, NMA-Comp, MA, and NUM. Both the raw and the difference data produced a significant main effect for this variable, minF'(3, 145) = 2.84, and minF'(3, 177) = 3.73, respectively, p < 0.05. We focus here on the difference scores (see Figure 1). These scores measure the extent to which the test contexts affect response times, relative to the neutral baseline case, and abstracting away from item and subject effects. The NMA cases with which the continuation word is compatible show an advantage relative to the baseline whereas the other cases are slower than the baseline.

The NUM control condition with the number agreement violation shows the largest increase in naming latencies relative to the baseline. The relevant comparison here is with the NMA+Comp condition, which had the acoustically identical prime sentence. Post-hoc analysis of the difference scores shows that these two conditions differ significantly (Newman- Keuls p < 0.05). This confirms that the task and materials were sensitive to the kind of syntactically determined anomaly previously tested by Tyler and Marslen-Wilson (1977), and that the subjects were interpreting the probe with respect to the preceding structural context, as it is only on this basis that the NUM probe is anomalous and the NMA+Comp probe is not. These differences between conditions are confirmed by the good/bad

TABLE 2 Midmean Response Latencies by Condition'

Raw Differenceb

NM A + Comp 375 -11 NMA-Comp 378 - 10 MA 397 + 14 NUM 412 + 24

~

"In msec. bDifference scores are mean differences between

raw RTs and RTs in the baseline condition (see text).


FIG. 1 . Reaction-time effects and appropriateness judgements. The mean difference scores (test - control) are plotted by condition against the left-hand y-axis. Mean appropriateness judgements (on a scale of 0-10) are plotted, by condition, against the right-hand y-axis.

ratings subjects gave for the continuations (see Figure 1). For a possible maximum of 10, the mean score for NMA+Comp was 9.9, and for NUM it was 0.5.

Rayner and Frazier (1987) found that the presence of an overt complementizer removed the ambiguity in the non-minimal attachment sentences, as reflected in a reduction of reading time relative to the condition without a complementizer. We predicted no such difference between the spoken NMA completion conditions, as the prosodic contour over the NMA-Comp utterance would disambiguate the string. The results confirm that the two NMA conditions did not differ. In addition, the NMA-Comp condition was significantly faster than the anomalous control (a tp < 0.05).

How do the results for the MA condition fit the hypotheses outlined above? If prosody has no effect, and subjects use the default strategy of minimal attachment in interpreting the strings they hear, then the visual probe should be incompatible with both MA and NMA-Comp, as both contain the same word strings. Alternatively, if prosody is used in the on-line interpretation of the utterance, then the NMA-Comp and MA conditions will be interpreted differently, with only NMA-Comp being compatible with the NMA probe word. This predicts slower repetitions for MA than either NMA-Comp or NMA+Comp. This is what Figure 1 shows. While the post hoc comparison of mid-means on the basis of minF’ scores just fails to reach significance, the item analysis shows a difference between MA and NMA-Comp, and the subject analysis shows MA to


differ from both NMA conditions (all significant values at p < 0.05, Newman-Keuls).

In contrast, the off-line appropriateness judgements suggest that the anomaly in the MA condition is qualitatively different from that in the NUM condition. Compared with a mean appropriateness score of 9.3 for the NMA-Comp tokens, the MA set scored 8.3 and the NUM items 0.5. Although the MA condition patterns with NUM conditions in terms of the immediate timed response, it seems to pattern with the NMA conditions in terms of the off-line judgement.

CONCLUSIONS

There are two interesting aspects to the results. First, they demonstrate that prosodic information can be used on-line to resolve potential ambiguities in the structural interpretation of the utterance. The same morphosyntactically ambiguous string of words will be assigned an NMA interpretation when it is read with an NMA contour, and an MA interpretation when read as an MA sentence. This is demonstrated by the difference between the MA and NMA-Comp naming latencies. Furthermore, the prosodic cues in the NMA-Comp case seem to be as effective as the combined prosodic and overt syntactic cues in the NMA+Comp case. The response latencies in these two conditions do not differ, and they have equally high ratings in the post-response judgement task.

This result implies, first, that the perception of spoken language is genuinely different from the perception of written language. Strings that are ambiguous and create additional processing load in the visual domain will be treated differently in the auditory domain, where prosodic cues steer the listener away from incorrect structural assignments without needing to wait upon explicit morphosyntactic cues further downstream. There may be much less need to backtrack than the visual data might lead one to believe.

What the research leaves open, however, is the exact mechanism whereby syntactic and prosodic cues are integrated together on-line. On the strongest interpretation, the prosodic input to the parser has the same status as its morphosyntactic input. Thus, on a story of the Frazier sort, where early asssignment follows the phrase-structure preferences of the parser, this assignment would be modulated by the presence of prosodic cues to correct attachment. This would not only remove many temporary attachment ambiguities, but also effectively prevent garden-paths of the sort apparently detectable in reading experiments.

The results we report are certainly compatible with this strong interpretation, but they do not rule out a weaker account, where prosodic cues come into play only after initial structural assignments have been suggested


on purely morphosyntactic grounds. The Frazier-type parser could still apply the minimal attachment strategy, but this would be blocked at a later point in processing if the resulting assignments conflicted with those indicated by prosodic cues. It is difficult to evaluate this possibility without probing earlier in the spoken string than we were able to here. This would tell us if there ever is a point, following the matrix verb, at which an attachment preference develops that fits the minimal attachment strategy but which conflicts with the prosody.

An added problem here is that the timing with which morphosyntactic and prosodic cues become available to the parser may not be perfectly synchronized. We know from the results of this experiment that prosodic cues do come into effect before the probe point, as otherwise we would not get the NMA-Comp/MA differences. But there may still be a period of two or three words early on, where an attachment ambiguity has emerged on morphosyntactic grounds and where there are still insufficient prosodic cues to resolve it.

The second interesting aspect of the results is the contrast we found between the on-line (naming latency) responses to the MA condition and the off-line (judgement) responses (as summarized in Figure 1). The on- line response treats the visual probe as anomalous, patterning with the NUM condition rather than the two NMA conditions. Thus, just as the fast responses in the NMA-Comp case indicate some degree of commitment to the NMA reading, the slower responses in the MA condition indicate some degree of commitment to the MA assignment.

In contrast, when listeners are asked to judge the appropriateness of the NMA continuation in the MA condition, they rate it very highly. We have, therefore, a situation where prosodic cues (and possibly also a default strategy) suggest one reading, and this is clearly the first choice of the parser. But when conflicting morphosyntactic information is encountered, this seems to override the initial preference for an MA reading, and it seems to do so, furthermore, without creating any strong sense of dis- ruption where the listeners are concerned.

This suggests that, while prosodic cues do affect the structure-building process, they are given less weight than morphosyntactic cues. But this only becomes apparent when there is a conflict between them. When prosodic cues are the only source of disambiguation (as in our NMA-Comp sentences) and there are no conflicting cues from other sources, then they seem to influence structural choice as effectively as overt rnorphosyntactic cues (as in the NMA+Comp conditions). This is analogous to results we obtained in earlier research (summarized in Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1987) looking at the integration of different cues to reference assignment in discourse processing. Here we found that cues deriving from the structure of the previous discourse (whether or not potential antecedents were in


focus) were as effective as overt lexical cues (such as personal pronouns) in determining reference assignment under conditions where assignment was ambiguous and where there were no cues from other sources. But when there was a conflict between discourse structure cues and lexical cues, then these lexical cues determined the outcome of the process, overriding the discourse cues.

One reason, perhaps, for the elusiveness of prosodic as well as discourse effects in research into language comprehension is this apparent dominance of overtly marked morphosyntactic cues. Prosodic cues to structure will operate most effectively under conditions of morphosyntactic ambiguity and underspecification, and these conditions may be more typical of natural conversational discourse than of the isolated sentences we tend to study in the laboratory.

Finally, the contrast between the on-line and the off-line measures underlies the importance of using both types of task to investigate the processes of language comprehension. An off-line task, such as the appropriateness judgement used here, requires some form of metalinguistic operation on the end products of processing, when all sources of information have been unified into a final representation. An on-line task, such as the cross-modal naming paradigm, seems able to tap intermediate stages of processing, before information integration is complete-in this experiment, evidently, before late-arriving morphosyntactic cues have over- ridden the structural choices suggested by earlier prosodic cues. It is clear that tasks of both sorts are essential to give a complete picture of how prosodic cues affect parsing and interpretation.

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Manuscript received 29 October 1991


APPENDIX Sentence materials used in the experiment. The position of the overt complementizer and the forms of the two continuations (non-minimal attachment and minimal attachment) are given for each of the 24 sentence sets.

1 . The workers considered (that) the last offer from the management /was a real insult /of

2. The clairvoyant predicted (that) the effects of the earthquake /would be quite minimal

3. The pupils knew (that) several solutions to the problem /would be quite possible /in

4. The scientist proved (that) the new theory about proteins /was completely invalid /and

5. The woman claimed (that) the profits from the sale /had been truly enormous /of the

6. The jury believed (that) the testimony of the last witness /was almost totally misleading

7. My neighbour found (that) his youngest daughter /was acting very strangely /and her dog. 8. The tutor understood (that) the student’s personal problems /were really very serious

9. The child expected (that) her first school report /would please her parents /with great

10. The contestant imagined (that) the small tropical islands /would be completely deserted

11. The drug dealer discovered (that) an undercover FBI agent /was living next door /in the

12. The maid revealed (that) the millionaire’s hidden safe /was in the bathroom /in the

13. The doctor confirmed (that) his initial diagnosis of lung cancer /was completely accurate

14. The teacher noticed (that) only one girl from her own class /was present this morning

15. The child accepted (that) her aunt’s death at the hospital /was quite imminent /with great

16. The zoologist observed (that) the behaviour of the animals /was distinctly abnormal /in

17. The astronomer observed (that) the satellite’s current orbit /was completely erratic

18. The politicians explained (that) their new scheme for taxation /was extremely fair /in

19. A journalist reported (that) the inquest’s findings on the murder /were entirely correct

20. The singer demonstrated (that) her vocal range in difficult pieces /was absolutely amazing

21. The large attendance proved (that) the lecture series by Professor Green /was a total

22. The senator demonstrated (that) some radical procedural changes /were obviously

23. The attendant indicated (that) the main exit of the building /was physically blocked /to

24. The instructor understands (that) the student’s current difficulties /have a long history

the factory.

/on the township.

Physics 100.

enzymes.

painting.

/for the prosecution.

/with work.

anticipation.

/in the middle of the Pacific.

house next door.

upstairs bathroom.

/with reluctance.

/in the group.

sorrow.

several settings.

/around Jupiter.

great detail.

/in today’s paper.

land duets.

success /on nutrition successful.

necessary /concerning voting rights.

the tourists.

/with his work.

Prosodic Effects in Minimal Attachment · PROSODIC EFFECTS IN MINIMAL AlTACHMENT 75 Holmes,...

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