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    Investigating sound and structure in concert: a pupillometry study of relative clause attachment

    Harris, J.A. and Lawn, A. and Kaps, Marju (2019) Investigating sound and structure in concert: a pupillometry study of relative clause attachment. In: UNSPECIFIED (ed.) Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2019: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, Montreal, Canada, July 24-27, 2019. NY Curran Associates, Inc., pp. 1880-1886. ISBN 0991196775.

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    Abstract

    Listeners must integrate multiple sources of information to construct an interpretation of a sentence. We concentrate here on the alignment of prosodic and syntactic grouping during online sentence comprehension. We present the results from a pupillometry study on the use of prosodic boundaries in resolving well-known attachment ambiguities. Using growth curve analyses to capture the non-linear dynamics of pupil dilation, we found increased pupil excursions for sentences that were disambiguated towards the dispreferred, non-local relation, especially when accompanied by supporting prosodic information. However, when prosodic and structural information did not align, pupillary response was muted, potentially indicating a failure to commit to a specific interpretation. More generally, the study shows how the currently under-utilized pupillometry method offers insights into spoken language comprehension.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book Section
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Marju Kaps
    Date Deposited: 08 Mar 2021 16:39
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:50
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/43177

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