Local and Global Effects of Prosodic Boundaries:Evidence from Eye Movements

Abstract

Although several studies have demonstrated that listeners integrate current prosodic boundaries with occurrences of relevant earlier prosodic boundaries in making syntactic attachment decisions (e.g., Carlson et al. 2001; Clifton et al. 2002), these studies have only used offline judgment tasks. The current study instead uses a visual world eye-tracking paradigm to examine whether global prosodic information has immediate impacts on parsing or whether its effects are delayed until after some initial processing of the local boundary. The fixation data showed that prosodic boundaries were interpreted just locally during online processing. There was only weak evidence for the effects of relative boundary strength on the final interpretation of a sentence. The data suggest that prosodic boundaries may be first processed locally and be integrated with relevant earlier boundaries only after a delay.