The Role of Reading Prosody in Syntactic and Semantic Integration: Evidence from Eye Movements

Eye-tracking methodology was used to examine the hypothesis that prosody contributes to integrative processing because it conveys the structure of the sentence, and therefore violating the correspondence between prosody and structure should result in difficulty in processing. Previous eye-movement studies indicate that subject-predicate mismatching (e.g., the boys eats) results in prolonged gaze durations. Experiment 1 showed that this mismatching effect, assumed to disclose online syntactic integration, was delayed or eliminated when the correspondence between prosody and the structure of the sentence was violated. In Experiment 2 sentences containing semantic incongruity (e.g., the tables eat) were used to examine whether semantic integration is similarly interrupted. The results suggest that when the correspondence between prosody and structure is violated semantic integration is delayed. The proposal that fluent and coherent reading prosody helps with online integration because it conveys the structure of the sentence is discussed in view of the results.