Irene de la Cruz-Pavía & Gorka Elordieta UPV-EHU

1. The prosody of ambiguous relative clauses in Spanish: a study of monolinguals and Basque-Spanish bilinguals Irene de la Cruz-Pavía & Gorka Elordieta UPV-EHU This research has been funded by: Basque Government (BFI07.253) and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO: MCyT (CSD 2007-00012).

2. 1. INTRODUCTION ● Syntactic processing: 1. What are the cognitive processes and strategies that take place during language processing? 2. What influences syntactic parsing?

3. 1. INTRODUCTION ● What role does prosody play? ● Prosodic principles influence in structural ambiguities resolution. (Schafer, Carter, Clifton y Frazier, 1996; Steinhauer, Alter y Friederici, 1999; Schafer, Speer, Warren y White, 2000; Snedecker y Trueswell, 2003; Frazier, Carlson, Clifton, 2006; Teira e Igoa, 2007)

4. 1. INTRODUCTION ● Speakers introduce effective prosodic cues (pauses, tonal rising) to create boundaries. ● Listeners use these prosodic cues to resolve syntactic ambiguities.

5. 1. INTRODUCTION ● Processing structural ambiguity in relative clauses. Someone shot the servantof the actresswho was on the balcony. NP1 NP2 RC [NP + PP] + RC

6. 1. INTRODUCTION ● High Attachment / Early Closure Someone shot the servantof the actresswho was on the balcony. NP1 NP2 RC

7. 1. INTRODUCTION ● Low Attachment / Late Closure Someone shot the servantof the actresswho was on the balcony. NP1 NP2 RC

8. → Early Closure / High Attachment CP DP alguien disparó a someone shot D NP el the NP RC N PP que ei estaba en el balcón criadoi whoi was on the balcony servanti P DP de of D NP la the N actriz actress

9. → Late Closure / Low Attachment CP DP alguien disparó a someone shot D NP el the N PP criado servant P DP de of D NP la the N RC actrizi actressique ei estaba en el balcón whoi was on the balcony

10. High Attachment preferenceLow Attachment preference Spanish (on-line + off-line) English (on-line + off-line) (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988) (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988; Fernández, 2002) French (on-line + off-line) Basque (off-line) (Zagar, Pynte and Rativeau, 1997) (Gutierrez, Carreiras and Laka, 2004) German (on-line) Italian (on-line + off-line) (Hemforth, Konieczny, Scheepers and Strube, 1998) (De Vincenzi and Job, 1993 and 1995) Dutch (on-line + off-line) Swedish (off-line) (Brysbaert and Mitchell, 1996) (Ehrlich, Fernández, Fodor, Stenshoel & Vinereanu, 1999) Galician (on-line) Romanian (off-line) (Fraga, García-Orza and Acuña, 2005) (Ehrlich et al., 1999) Afrikaans (off-line) Norwegian (off-line) (Mitchell, Brysbaert, Grondelaers and Swanpoel, 2000) (Ehrlich et al., 1999) Greek (on-line) Brazilian Portuguese (on-line) (Clahsen & Felser, 2006) (Miyamoto, 1998)

11. 2. The Prosodic Hypothesis (Fodor: 1998, 2002) ● The prosodic processor packages the input into chunks in an initial stage of processing. - Antigravity Law: Heavy constituents can rise, but light constituents stay low. Prosodic weight is defined by constituent length. - The longer the RC the heavier.

12. 2. The Prosodic Hypothesis (Fodor 1998, 2002) • Same-Size-Sister constraint:Find a sister of your own size. • The prosodic constituents of a sentence must have a balanced size. - Light/small RCs attach low in the syntactic tree. Heavy/large RCs attach high.

13. 2. The Prosodic Hypothesis (Fodor 1998, 2002) • Implicit Prosody Hypothesis: In silent reading a prosodic contour is imposed on the input string. - Results obtained by Maynell (1999) and Lovrić, Bradley and Fodor (2000, 2001) show a correlation between prosodic breaks and RC attachment.

14. 2. The Prosodic Hypothesis (Fodor 1998, 2002) ●Prosodic break after NP1 Low Attachment Someone shot the servant]break [of the actress that was on the balcony. NP1 NP2 ● Prosodic break after NP2 High Attachment Someone shot the servant of the actress]break [that was on the balcony. NP1 NP2

15. 3. EXPERIMENTS ● Two part experiment: production + questionnaire - Same materials and participants. - Order of the experiments: counterbalanced ● Plausibility/Naturalness test: 48 sentences + fillers The 36 most plausible/natural were selected (mean rate 6.16) 1----------------------------------------------7 not plausible/natural very plausible/natural

16. 3.1. PRODUCTION METHODOLOGY ● 36 experimental sentences containing: NP1 de NP2 + RC. 48 fillers pseudorandomly mixed: two lists ● The length of the RC was manipulated and sorted into three groups: 3-4 syll.; 6-7 syll.; 9-11 syll..

17. METHODOLOGY ● 24 participants: 8 Spanish monolinguals, 8 Basque-Spanish bilinguals L1 Spanish and 8 Basque- Spanish bilinguals L1 Basque. ● Task: to read the sentences aloud in a natural way. ● The utterances were recorded in an anechoic room. ● Skimming: 4 participants per linguistic group

18. METHODOLOGY ● Amount of experimental items recorded: 864 (2016 in total, fillers included) ● Amount of analyzed utterances: 844 ● We analyzed the prosodic contours of the critical region (the complex NP and the beginning of the RC). ● Prosodic cues: continuation rise, pause, lengthening.

19. METHODOLOGY Ayer ayudé al abuelo del ganaderobreak que adoraba comer lasaña todos los viernes.

20. PREDICTIONS ● Presence of a prosodic break between NP1 and NP2 in the sentences with the shortest RC (3-4 syll.) Nadie habló al amigo / del gamberro que vino. break ● Presence of a prosodic break between NP2 and RC in the sentences with longer RCs (6-7 and 9-11 syll.) El hombre despidió al hermano del marinero / que hablaba portugués. break

21. RESULTS ● Neutral vs. non-neutral utterances

22. RESULTS ● 90.9% of the boundaries: continuation rise ● 15.3% were combined with pauses and 7.1% with lengthening

23. RESULTS ● 21.1% of the prosodic breaks were placed after NP1 78.9% prosodic breaks after NP2

24. METHODOLOGY Mi madre invitó a la sobrinabreak de la bailarina que bebía.

25. RESULTS ● 75% of the prosodic breaks after NP1 are introduced in the group containing the shortest RCs (3-4 syll.)

26. RESULTS ● The longer the RC, the higher the frequency of appearance of a prosodic break after NP2.

27. RESULTS ● L1 Basque bilinguals: significantly higher number of neutral utterances (χ²=11.98, p<.005)

28. RESULTS ● Higher frequency of clear boundaries.

29. RESULTS ● Monolinguals and L1 Spanish Bilinguals were clearer in their prosodic breaks than L1 Basque bilinguals (χ²=7.16, p<.05)

30. RESULTS ● Skimming: higher presence of boundary cues (χ²=32.73, p<.001)

31. RESULTS ● Skimming: higher frequency of prosodic boundaries after NP2 (χ²=9.47, p<.005)

32. CONCLUSIONS ● Default prosodic contour: prosodic boundary after NP2 (72%) high attachment ● These results fulfill Fodor’s Antigravity Law’s predictions partially. - Long (heavy) RCs show a clear preference for high attachment (91.85%). - Short (light) RCs show a much smaller preference for high attachment (55%).

33. CONCLUSIONS ● Basque dominant speakers produce fewer prosodic breaks and these are less clear than Spanish dominant speakers. ● Skimming the sentences leads to more non-neutral utterances; ● and to a higher frequency of the default contour (break after NP2).

34. CONCLUSIONS Prosodic weight (in terms of number of syllables) influences prosodic segmentation.

35. 3.2. QUESTIONNAIREAIMS ● To study ambiguous RC attachment preferences of participants of production study. ● Is there a correlation between prosodic segmentation and attachment preferences?

36. METHODOLOGY ● Same materials and same participants. ● Task: read the sentences silently and choose an antecedent for the empty subject of the RC.

37. PREDICTIONS ● 3-4 syllable RCs: NP2 as preferred host in around 50% of the sentences. Alguien llevó al amigo del niño que lloraba. ¿Quién lloraba? el amigo el niño ● 6-7 and 9-11 syllable RCs: NP1 as preferred host in almost every sentence. El hombre despidió al hermano del marinero que hablaba portugués. ¿Quién hablaba portugués? el hermano el marinero

38. RESULTS ● General low attachment preference

39. Prosodic break Expectancy of location attch. preference

40. 1. INTRODUCTION ● Low Attachment / Late Closure Someone shot the servant / of the actresswho was on the balcony. NP1 break NP2 RC

41. Prosodic break Expectancy of location attch. preference

42. 1. INTRODUCTION ● High Attachment / Early Closure Someone shot the servantof the actress / who was on the balcony. NP1 NP2 break RC

43. Prosodic break Expectancy of location attch. preference

44. Expectancy of Questionnaire attch. preference results

45. CONCLUSIONS • Great interpersonal variability • No correlation between prosodic contours and attachment preference.

46. CONCLUSIONS • Why? • Implicit prosody is not similar to explicit prosody. or • An off-line experiment only reveals the end decision taken by the participant.

47. FUTURE RESEARCH • Perception experiment: • Auditorilly present utterances with different prosodic contours. • Participants will have to choose the preferred antecedent.

48. Thank you! And thank you also to: all the participants Edurne Petrirena ELEBILAB BRAINGLOT

49. 4. Results ●Linguistic Group x length x site of the prosodic boundary: 3-4 syllables

50. 4. Results ● Linguistic Group x length x site of the prosodic boundary: 6-7 syllables and 9-11 syllables