Effects of focus on prosodic reflections of phrase structure in American English

Reports in the sentence processing literature on whether untrained speakers reliably disambiguate syntactic phrase structure ambiguities with prosody have shown mixed results. Allbritton et al (1996), Straub (1997), and Snedeker et al (1999) found little to no evidence of prosodic disambiguation of syntax when other factors resolved the ambiguity, and argued that prosodic disambiguation is produced only when required by the situation. Schafer et al (2000) and Warren et al (2000) found strong evidence of prosodic disambiguation even in unambiguous situations. We examine how another factor, focus, affects the prosodic disambiguation of syntactic phrase structure, potentially clarifying these seemingly conflicting results.