Phoneme restoration methods for investigating prosodic influences on syntactic processing

Abstract

We present a novel method for establishing the preferred interpretation of ambiguities in spoken sentences. It makes use of the phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970): when noise replaces phoneme(s) in a word, listeners report that they perceive the word as intact and congruent with the context. If the word disambiguates a potentially ambiguous sentence, the word that is “heard” reveals which interpretation listeners assigned. The advantage of this method is its naturalness: no deliberative judgements, no interrupting task, no attention drawn to the ambiguity, and no reliance on anomalous sentences. Our experiments examined the contribution of prosodic phrasing to syntactic ambiguity resolution, using three different tasks to probe what participants thought they had heard: Visual Word Choice, Sentence Repetition, and Speech Shadowing. All three tasks showed a powerful effect of prosody on the resolution of two syntactic ambiguities in Bulgarian.

Keywords:

• Phoneme restoration
• Syntactic ambiguity
• Prosody
• Shadowing
• Bulgarian
• Methodology

Acknowledgements

We thank the audiences at the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (Cornell University, April 2008) and the Charles Clifton Festschrift (The Royal Society of Edinburgh, May 2008), as well as two anonymous reviewers, for comments and suggestions that have improved this paper.

Notes

¹We thank an anonymous reviewer for urging us to discuss this point, which to the best of our knowledge has not been addressed since it was raised by Samuel in 1981.