Phrasing effects in comprehending PP constructions.

The role of prosodic phrasing in sentence comprehension was investigated by means of three different tasks, namely auditory word monitoring (Experiment 1), self-paced reading (Experiment 2) and cross-modal comparison (Experiment 3). In all three experiments a critical prosodic unit or frame comprising a determiner, a noun and a Prepositional Phrase (PP) was preceded or surrounded by two context prosodic units (frames) whose length was varied. The participants' tendency to interpret the critical sequence as forming a single syntactic constituent (noun-complement interpretation of the PP) as opposed to two distinct syntactic constituents (verb-complement interpretation of the PP) was found to depend on the relative length of the critical and context prosodic units (frames). As a whole these results are consistent with the notion that phrasing effects occur in a retroactive way, after part of the utterance has been processed.