Schafer & al. (1996, 2000) showed that during comprehension listeners use prosodic cues to disambiguate syntactic structures. They present evidence that the distribution of pitch accents and prosodic boundaries such as intermediate phrase boundaries strongly influences attachment decisions: when presented with acoustic materials spoken by trained speakers, listeners prefer to attach a relative clause that can be attached to either NP1 or NP2 to the NP that has a stronger pitch accent, while a prosodic boundary between the complex NP and the RC results in an NP1 preference. With regard to naïve speakers, Schafer & al. (2000) present evidence that they also use prosody to disambiguate syntactic ambiguities.
We investigated whether naïve speakers of German prosodically disambiguate ambiguous structures of the type NP1-NP2-RC. We had 16 subjects read sentences like (1) and (2) in which we varied the attachment site of the relative clause (NP1 vs. NP2). Subjects were instructed to read each sentence silently first and were then presented with a question referring to the attachment of the RC in order to check whether the subjects had correctly understood to which NP the relative clause refers. Subjects were then told to read the sentence aloud.
Our results show that prosodic parameters are used during production to disambiguate syntactic structures. However, although the prosodic parameters we found are the same that Schafer & al. (1996) claim to be relevant for comprehension in English, we have no evidence yet that the prosodic parameters used for disambiguation by German speakers also guide comprehension. We are currently preparing a comprehension experiment in which subjects will be presented with materials from the production study to check whether the disambiguating prosodic parameters used in production are used by listeners to disambiguate syntactic structures.