Recycling prosodic boundaries

The present study investigates the role of prosodic structure in selecting a syntactic analysis at different stages of parsing in silent reading of Japanese relative clauses. Experiments 1 and 2 (sentence-completion questionnaires) revealed an effect of the length of the sentence-initial constituent on the resolution of a clause boundary ambiguity in Japanese. Experiment 3 (fragment-reading) showed that this length manipulation is also reflected in prosodic phrasing in speech. Its influence on ambiguity resolution is attributed to recycling of prosodic boundaries established during the first-pass parse. This explanation is based on the implicit prosody proposals of Bader (1998) and Fodor (1998). Experiment 4 (self-paced reading) demonstrated the immediacy of the influence on ambiguity resolution on-line. Experiment 5 (self-paced reading) found support for the additional prediction that when no boundary is available to be recycled, processing the relative clause construction is more difficult.