Lexical, Pragmatic, and Prosodic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Younger, Older, and Aphasic Adults

Download or read book Lexical, Pragmatic, and Prosodic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Younger, Older, and Aphasic Adults written by Gayle Lucia Dede and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Three self-paced listening experiments examined the role of verb bias, plausibility, and prosodic phrasing during auditory sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 studied younger, older, and aphasic adults' syntactic ambiguity resolution in early closure sentences (e.g., "While the parents watched, the child sang a song."). The stimuli contained transitively biased subordinate verbs paired with plausible direct objects or intransitively biased subordinate verbs paired with implausible direct objects. There were two prosodic conditions. In the cooperating prosodic condition, an intonational phrase boundary marked the clausal boundary following the subordinate verb. In the neutral prosodic condition, the clause boundary was unmarked. Experiment 2 investigated the role of verb bias in younger, older, and aphasic adults' processing of syntactically unambiguous transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 3 studied younger adults' syntactic ambiguity resolution in early closure sentences. The critical stimuli, which were pronounced with cooperating and neutral prosodic contours, varied verb transitivity bias but controlled plausibility. The subordinate verbs were transitively or intransitively biased, but were always followed by plausible direct objects. The results supported fully interactive models of sentence comprehension. For the younger adults, Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated that lexical-pragmatic and prosodic cues interact during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 demonstrated that older adults were sensitive to the same cues as younger adults, but used the cues to minimize processing load associated with conflicting cues. Experiment 2 suggested that younger and older adults were sensitive to mismatches between verb bias and sentence structure in syntactically simple sentences. The results of Experiment 1 suggested that the aphasic group was sensitive to the lexical-pragmatic and prosodic cues, but did not use them as efficiently as the control group. In Experiment 2, the aphasic group showed sensitivity to verb mismatch in an off-line comprehension measure but not in on-line listening times. Analyses of subgroups of aphasic adults based on clinical classifications and specific symptoms revealed that the most coherent subgroups were identified on the basis of comprehension performance on Experiment 2. Overall, the aphasic group's data were consistent with slowed processing accounts of sentence comprehension impairments in aphasia.