Role of duration in disambiguating syntactically ambiguous sentences

The present study investigated whether listeners use the prosodic variable, duration, to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences. Some of the sentences’ meanings could be represented by two distinct syntactic bracketings, e.g., ’’The hostess [greeted the girl with a smile.’’ and ’’ The hostess greeted [the girl with a smile.].’’ Other sentences, while ambiguous, had a common syntactic bracketing, e.g., ’’German teachers visit Greensboro.’’ In this experiment the duration of words corresponding to ambiguous constituents of the sentences or containing ambiguous boundaries of the constituents was varied systematically. Subjects listened to the sentences and selected one of the two meanings. The results indicated that only sentences in which the two meanings were represented by two distinct syntactic bracketings were reliably disambiguated by durational cues. It is suggested that when the interstress interval spanning a major syntactic boundary is increased, listeners perceive the boundary’s presence. Subject Classification: 4370.30, 4370.70.