Direct speech quotations promote low relative-clause attachment in silent reading of English

Yao, B. and Scheepers, C. (2018) Direct speech quotations promote low relative-clause attachment in silent reading of English. Cognition, 176. pp. 248-254. ISSN 0010-0277

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Abstract

The implicit prosody hypothesis (Fodor, 1998, 2002) proposes that silent reading coincides with a default, implicit form of prosody to facilitate sentence processing. Recent research demonstrated that a more vivid form of implicit prosody is mentally simulated during silent reading of direct speech quotations (e.g., Mary said, “This dress is beautiful”), with neural and behavioural consequences (e.g., Yao, Belin, & Scheepers, 2011; Yao & Scheepers, 2011). Here, we explored the relation between ‘default’ and ‘simulated’ implicit prosody in the context of relative-clause (RC) attachment in English. Apart from confirming a general low RC-attachment preference in both production (Experiment 1) and comprehension (Experiments 2 and 3), we found that during written sentence completion (Experiment 1) or when reading silently (Experiment 2), the low RC-attachment preference was reliably enhanced when the critical sentences were embedded in direct speech quotations as compared to indirect speech or narrative sentences. However, when reading aloud (Experiment 3), direct speech did not enhance the general low RC-attachment preference. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest a quantitative boost to implicit prosody (via auditory perceptual simulation) during silent production/comprehension of direct speech. By contrast, when reading aloud (Experiment 3), prosody becomes equally salient across conditions due to its explicit nature; indirect speech and narrative sentences thus become as susceptible to prosody-induced syntactic biases as direct speech. The present findings suggest a shared cognitive basis between default implicit prosody and simulated implicit prosody, providing a new platform for studying the effects of implicit prosody on sentence processing.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Cognition
Additional Information:
This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognition, 176, 248-254, 2018 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.017
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3310
Subjects:
?? implicit prosodyrelative-clause attachmentinner voicedirect quotationsindirect speechmental simulationlinguistics and languagecognitive neuroscienceexperimental and cognitive psychologylanguage and linguistics ??
ID Code:
174660
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
18 Aug 2022 10:00
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
09 Aug 2024 00:54