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The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation
Abstract
Prosodic structure and syntactic structure are not identical; neither are they unrelated. Knowing when and how the two correspond could yield better quality speech synthesis, could aid in the disambiguation of competing syntactic hypotheses in speech understanding, and could lead to a more comprehensive view of human speech processing. In a set of experiments involving 35 pairs of phonetically similar sentences representing seven types of structural contrasts, the perceptual evidence shows that some, but not all, of the pairs can be disambiguated on the basis of prosodic differences. The phonological evidence relates the disambiguation primarily to boundary phenomena, although prominences sometimes play a role. Finally, phonetic analyses describing the attributes of these phonological markers indicate the importance of both absolute and relative measures.
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Cited by
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The semantics of prosody: acoustic and perceptual evidence of prosodic correlates to word meaning
Nygaard, L. C., Herold, D. S., & Namy, L. L. (2009) · Cognitive Science · doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2008.01007.x · Cited by 104
Ways of looking ahead: Hierarchical planning in language production
Lee, E.-K., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Watson, D. G. (2013) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.007 · Cited by 100
Variation in dual-task performance reveals late initiation of speech planning in turn-taking
Sjerps, M. J., & Meyer, A. S. (2015) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.10.008 · Cited by 85
Effective use of prosody in parsing conversational speech
Kahn, J. G., Lease, M., Charniak, E., Johnson, M., & Ostendorf, M. (2005) · Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - HLT '05 · doi:10.3115/1220575.1220605 · Cited by 53
Metadata
- Authors
- Price, P. J., Ostendorf, M., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Fong, C.
- Venue
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Publisher
- Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
- Published
- 1991-12-01
- Volume
- 90
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 2956-2970
- ISSN
- 0001-4966 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-8524
- OpenAlex
- W2007605886
- Cited by
- 644
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 13.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Price, P. J., Ostendorf, M., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Fong, C. (1991). The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.401770
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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