Effects and limitations of prosodic and semantic biases on syntactic disambiguation.

This paper examined the effects of prosody on the syntactic ambiguity resolution of Japanese sentences, especially with reference to the interaction with semantic bias. Syntactically ambiguous sentences with different types of semantic bias were constructed. The degree of bias in each sentence was evaluated through visual presentation experiments. Three types of sentences were selected based on the results of visual presentation experiments, were recorded with prosody maximally favoring each possible interpretation of the sentences, and were used as the stimuli for the auditory presentation experiments. The results showed that prosodic cues can influence the interpretation of a sentence even when the sentence is strongly semantically biased. The results also showed a limitation to prosodic cues. The prosodic biases alone were not sufficient to fully determine the interpretation of the sentences even when the sentences were neutrally biased semantically.