Focus and the Interpretation of Pitch Accent: Disambiguating Embedded Questions

It has been suggested that prosodic disambiguation of sentences is largely a matter of prosodic phrasing. Ambiguities can be resolved if a prosodic break aligns with a major syntactic boundary of one structure but not another. The placement of pitch accents is viewed as playing only a supporting role (cf. Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Huffnagel, & Fong, 1991). This view of prosodic disambiguation does not apply tho all structures of a language. We report five experiments studying ambiguous sentences like (i) and (ii): (i) I asked the pretty little girl WHO is cold. I asked the pretty little girl who is COLD. (ii) Joshua began to wonder WHEN his girlfriend got a tattoo. Joshua began to wonder when his girl friend got a TATTOO. The presence of a prominent pitch accent on the interrogative constituent ( who, when) biased listeners to a emmbedded question interpretation whereas its absence biased thhem to a relative clause(i) or temporal adjunct(ii) analysis. The results suggest that accent, like prosodic breaks, can play a central role in guiding sentence comprehension.