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Free keywords:
anticipatory eye movements, prosody, constituent order ambiguity,
grammatical function, intonation
Abstract:
An eye-tracking experiment examined whether prosodic cues can affect the
interpretation of grammatical functions in the absence of clear morphological
information. German listeners were presented with scenes depicting three potential
referents while hearing temporarily ambiguous SVO and OVS sentences. While case
marking on the first noun phrase (NP) was ambiguous, clear case marking on the
second NP disambiguated sentences towards SVO or OVS. Listeners interpreted caseambiguous NP1s more often as Subject, and thus expected an Object as upcoming
argument, only when sentence beginnings carried an SVO-type intonation. This was
revealed by more anticipatory eye movements to suitable Patients (Objects) than
Agents (Subjects) in the visual scenes. No such preference was found when sentence
beginnings had a clearly OVS-type intonation. Prosodic cues were integrated rapidly
enough to affect listeners’ interpretation of grammatical function before
disambiguating case information was available. We conclude that in addition to
manipulating attachment ambiguities, prosody can influence the interpretation of
constituent order ambiguities.
