What is in contrast? - The role of prosodic prominence in ambiguity resolution

摘要

Two eye-tracking visual world experiments investigate the interaction between the contrast-marking prosody and contextually elicited contrast for the comprehension of an ambiguous branching structure (left-branching or right-branching) in Japanese such as buru'u-no ne'ko-no ka'sa 'blue cat-Gen umbrella'. The presence/absence of pitch expansion on Word 2 (N1, e.g., ne'ko-no, denoting the pattern/design of the object denoted by N2) was manipulated to examine the effect of the contrast-marking and the structure-marking prosody. The contextually-elicited contrast was also manipulated by controlling the prime and the target sequence, either standing in a color-contrast or in a pattern/design contrast. Our results demonstrate that the priming effect is subjected to inhibition when the accompanying prosody and the visual context is in a dissonance. The structurally less-preferred right-branching interpretation can be elicited only when both prosody and context support it.