Implicit and explicit prosody in relative clause attachment

Using production, perception, and psycholinguistic tasks, this study investigates the interactive effects of prosodic prominence and phrasing on relative clause attachment in English. According to the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor 1998/2002), the presence of a prosodic boundary before or after NP2 in NP1-NP2-RC constructions in English should prompt low or high attachment, respectively. We have found this to be systematically untrue for some individuals. We are currently exploring the possibility that the use of prosodic boundaries for syntactic closure in sentence processing is sensitive to individual differences in attention and memory for prominence structure. Another part of this project explores the role of prominence in RC attachment cross-linguistically.

Collaborators:
Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA)
Adam Chong (Queen Mary University of London)

Related Publications:

• Bishop, J. (2021). Exploring the similarity between implicit and explicit prosody: Prosodic phrasing and individual differences. Language and Speech, 64(4), 873-899.
• Jun, S.-A. & Bishop, J. (2015). Priming implicit prosody: Prosodic boundaries and individual differences. Language and Speech, 58(4) 459-473.
• Jun, S.-A. & Bishop, J. (2015). Prominence in relative clause attachment: Evidence from prosodic priming. Evidence from individual differences. In L. Frazier & E. Gibson (Eds.), Explicit and implicit prosody in sentence processing: Studies in honor of Janet Dean Fodor. (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, Vol 46). Springer.
• Bishop, J., Chong, A., & Jun, S.-A. (2015). Individual differences in prosodic strategies to sentence parsing. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.

Prosodic prominence perception & individual differences

This project consists of a number of sub-projects that approach the perception and processing of prosodic prominence. One group of experiments explores the perception of prosodic events in English using a ‘rapid prosody transcription’ method (Cole, Mo, & Hasagawa-Johnson, 2010) and a similar task used in Bishop (2012). In these experiments, we attempt to predict naive listeners’ perception of phrasing and prominence using Intonational Phonological categories, sentence-level semantic/information structural context, and measures of pragmatic processing. Parts of this study are funded by PSC-CUNY Enhanced Grant #67842-00 45. to J. Bishop. In a different set of experiments (with Rysling, Clifton, & Yacovone) we are exploring the use of distal versus local prosody on the anticipation of pitch accents in English (a reexamination of an early finding in Cutler, 1976).

Collaborators:
Grace Kuo (National Taiwan University)
Boram Kim (CUNY)
Amanda Rysling (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Charles Clifton (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Anthony Yacovone (Harvard)

Related Work:

• Clifton, C., Rysling, A., & Bishop, J. (2022). The Accent Advantage in Phoneme Detection: Importance of Local Context. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 84(1), 244-259.
• Bishop, J., Kuo, G., & Kim, B. (2020). Phonology, phonetics, and signal-extrinsic factors in the perception of prosodic prominence: Evidence from Rapid Prosody Transcription. Journal of Phonetics, 82 (Special Issue on Integrating Phonetic and Phonological Perspectives on Prominence). 100977.
• Rysling, A., Bishop, J., Clifton, C., & Yacovone, A. (2020). Preceding syllables are necessary for the accent advantage effect. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 184(3), EL285 – EL288.
• Bishop, J. (2016). Individual differences in top-down and bottom-up prominence perception. In J. Barnes, A. Brugos, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, & N. Veilleux (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2016. (pp. 668–672).
• Hurley, R. & Bishop, J. (2016). Interpretation of “only”: prosodic influences and individual differences. In J. Barnes, A. Brugos, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, & N. Veilleux (Eds.). Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2016. (pp. 193–197).
• Bishop, J. (2012). Information structural expectations in the perception of prosodic prominence. In G. Elordieta and P. Prieto (Eds.) Prosody and Meaning (Interface Explorations). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.