Prosodic Effects in Minimal Attachment

There is no dispute that the comprehension of spoken language involves the use of different types of linguistic information-syntactic, semantic, lexical, prosodic. What is less clear is when and how these different types of information are used in the comprehension process. In this paper we focus on prosodic information, and ask whether it is used to constrain the immediate structural interpretation of an utterance. One view of the comprehension process is that it involves the immediate integration of various types of linguistic information as they become available. There is considerable experimental support for this view. A number of studies (e.g. Grosjean, 1980; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980; MarslenWilson, Tyler, & Seidenberg, 1978; Swinney, Zurif, & Cutler, 1980; Tyler & Marslen-Wilson, 1977) have shown that syntactic and semantic information is used on-line to determine the immediate interpretation of an utterance. Marslen-Wilson and Tyler (1980), for example, found that target words in normal utterances and in utterances that were grammatically well