Pauses and Parsing: Testing the Role of Prosodic Chunking in Sentence Processing

It is broadly accepted that the prosody of a sentence can influence sentence processing by providing the listener information about the syntax of the sentence. It is less clear what the mechanism is that underlies the transmission of this information. In this paper, we test whether the influence of the prosodic structure on parsing is a result of perceptual breaks such as pauses or whether it is the result of more abstract prosodic elements, such as intonational phrases. In three experiments, we test whether different types of perceptual breaks, e.g., intonational boundaries (Experiment 1), an artificial buzzing sound (Experiment 2), and an isolated pause (Experiment 3), influence syntactic attachment in ambiguous sentences. We find that although full intonational boundaries influence syntactic disambiguation, the artificial buzz and isolated pause do not. These data rule out theories that argue that perceptual breaks indirectly influence grammatical attachment through memory mechanisms, and instead, show that listeners use prosodic breaks themselves as cues to parsing.