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Do Speakers Help Listeners?
Prosodic Cues, Lexical Cues, and Ambiguity Avoidance
Karen Mims and John C. Trueswell, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract
Experiment 1 investigated whether speakers use lexical and/or prosodic cues to avoid ambiguity. Twenty subjects produced target sentences containing a direct object/sentence complement local ambiguity from memory (e.g. The secretary remembered you were out for the day). Utterances were analyzed for lexical and prosodic cues of disambiguation. Results showed that speakers do not use lexical that-insertion (e.g. The secretary remembered that you were out for the day) to avoid ambiguity. Results for prosodic cues were mixed, but give some evidence that speakers use disambiguating prosodic cues.
Experiment 2 explored whether listeners could use the prosodic cues available in utterances from Experiment 1 to predict sentence structure. Ten subjects tried to predict sentence structure from spliced fragments of utterances obtained in Experiment 1 (e.g. The secretary remembered...). Though the trends were in the predicted direction, no effects were significant.