Poster E28

Prosodic phrasing in spoken Korean garden path sentences: An ERP study

Hyekyung Hwang¹, Karsten Steinhauer¹;¹Centre for Research on Language, Mind, and Brain, McGill University

It is well-known that prosodic structure plays an important role in the recovery of syntactic structure (e.g., Clifton et al., 2002, Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999). Prosodic boundaries at potential syntactic boundaries facilitate (dispreferred) processing, whereas prosodic boundaries that mismatch syntactic boundaries lead to initial misunderstandings (‘garden-path’ effect). The immediate use of prosodic information in the comprehension of temporarily ambiguous sentences has been demonstrated by ERP investigations (e.g., Steinhauer et al., 1999), but cross-linguistic evidence is still limited. We present data from our first ERP study investigating spoken Korean garden path sentences to test the same paradigm used in the previous Korean ERP study in reading (Hwang & Steinhauer, 2009) and thereby to further specify the cognitive mechanisms of prosodic online processing as well as respective ERP correlates. An early ambiguous dative noun-phrase (NP) following a matrix subject phrase can locally associate with the matrix or the relative clause. By changing the position of a second dative NP (either in the matrix or the relative clause), two different unambiguous interpretations were construed. Prosodic patterns were defined by comparing the boundary sizes surrounding the ambiguous NP: prosodic structures cooperated or conflicted with syntactic structures to different extent. Prosodic patterns were crossed with matrix subject length. Filler sentences included various types of ungrammatical sentences. As predicted and similar to the previous reading study, ERP data of 36 Korean speakers showed the Closure Positive Shift at prosodic boundaries. Also, different patterns of prosodic phrasing caused or prevented garden-path effects at the end of sentences.

Keywords: Primary = LANGUAGE: Other; Secondary = LANGUAGE: Syntax

 
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