PROSODIC INFLUENCES ON THE RESOLUTION OF LEXICAL AMBIGUITY

摘要: A classic finding in research on prosody is that of Lehiste (1973), who showed that prosody could reliably disambiguate surface structure ambiguities, but not lexical ambiguities. Numerous studies have confirmed the syntactic effects of prosodic phrasing information. We will present results from two experiments, using cross-modal naming and end-of-sentence tasks, which show that prosodic phrasing can also affect lexical disambiguation, including cases of within-category lexical ambiguity. We will further show that phonological phrase (PPh) and intonational phrase (IPh) boundaries have separable effects on processing, with IPh boundaries leading to further interpretive processing than PPh boundaries. Specifically, we will argue in support of the Interpretive Domain Hypothesis, given in (1).