A Prosódia no PARSING: evidências experimentais do acesso à informação prosódica no INPUT linguístico

Abstract

This present study aims to demonstrate, through experimental evidences, that both Brazilian and European Portuguese (BP and EP) speakers use prosodic cues on input of sentences processing early and they build syntactic structure with this cues. We analyzed the BP and EP prosodic utterance of local ambiguity known in the psycholinguistic as Garden-Path sentences by production tasks. These structures have a NP on an ambiguity position which may be incorrectly interpretedas an object of the first verb; however it is actually the subject of the following verb, for instance: a) While Mary was mending the sock fell off her lap; b) Mary kissed John and Paul started to laugh.We observed on speech production task that the speakers highlight an IPboundary to show the desired apposition for NP involved on the Early/Late Closure ambiguities.Then, we conducted perception tests with two experimental techniquesnamed Click Detection and Self-paced Listening to verify if the prosodic cues used on reading are perceived by listeners and may influence on both comprehension and syntactic analysis of sentences.The results perception tasks showed that the listeners are able to identifyprosodic particularities and use the intonational phrasing on sentencesinterpretation; this fact supports the Rational Speaker Hypothesis established by Carlson et al (2001): speakers are self-consistent, employing intonation in a manner consistent with their intended message and listeners interpret intonation by assuming that speakers do not make prosodic choices without some reason (andare, therefore, rational).The results corroborate with the fact that parser use the availableprosodic cues to build the syntactic structure as well to use cues from other sources such as lexical and pragmatic. In our case, the results about the prosodic constituent on processing are related to Kjelgaard & Speer (1999) and findings also to Phon-Concurrent Model developed by Blodgett (2004b). However, we could not determine the order that cues from different sources are accessed or what the weight of each one has within these competitors structures when more than onethese cues are competing and being conflictive. According to DeDe (2010), we can say that the prosody influences parser, but there is no feasible explanation for its interaction with other linguistics cues on processing.