Do Individual Differences in Prominence Perception Predict Individual Differences in Syntactic Parsing? a lecture by Jason Bishop

This Academic Speakers Series is presented by the Concordia Linguistics Student Association and the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics.

A long-standing problem in sentence processing research is how language users resolve syntactic ambiguities like that in (1), where the relative clause who was on the balcony could be parsed as attaching either high in the structure, to the servant (NP1), or low, to the actress (NP2):

(1) “Someone saw the servant of the actress who was on the balcony.”

How does prosody contribute to ambiguity resolution in such cases?