Prosodic Boundary Effects on Syntactic Disambiguation in Children with Cochlear Implants, and in Normal Hearing Adults and Children
type: CreativeWork
description: Theoretical Framework: Manipulations of prosodic structure influence how listeners interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences. However, the interface between prosody and syntax has received very little attention in languages other than English. Furthermore, many children with cochlear implants (CI) have deficits in sentence comprehension. Until now, these deficits have been attributed only to syntax, leaving prosody a neglected area, despite its clear deficit on this population and the role it plays in sentence comprehension. Purposes: Experiment 1 investigates prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese while experiment 2 investigates these effects in Brazilian Portuguese speaking children with CIs. Both experiments tested two hypotheses relying on the notion of boundary strength: the absolute boundary hypothesis (ABH) and the relative boundary hypothesis (RBH). The ABH states that only the high boundary before the ambiguous constituent influences attachment whereas the RBH advocates that the high boundary before the ambiguous constituent can only be interpreted according to the relative size of an earlier low boundary. Specific predictions of the two hypotheses were tested. Relationships between attachment results and performance on psychoacoustic tests of gap detection threshold and frequency limen were also investigated. Materials: The experiments were designed on E-Prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA). The sentences were recorded on Praat software (Boersma & Weenink, 2013), controlling for F0, duration of components and pauses between components. The prosodic boundaries were measured with the ToBI coding system distinguishing acoustic measures of intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IPh) boundaries. Methods: Twenty-three normal hearing (NH) adults, 15 NH children and 13 children with CIs who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese participated in a computerized…
abstract: Theoretical Framework: Manipulations of prosodic structure influence how listeners interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences. However, the interface between prosody and syntax has received very little attention in languages other than English. Furthermore, many children with cochlear implants (CI) have deficits in sentence comprehension. Until now, these deficits have been attributed only to syntax, leaving prosody a neglected area, despite its clear deficit on this population and the role it plays in sentence comprehension. Purposes: Experiment 1 investigates prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese while experiment 2 investigates these effects in Brazilian Portuguese speaking children with CIs. Both experiments tested two hypotheses relying on the notion of boundary strength: the absolute boundary hypothesis (ABH) and the relative boundary hypothesis (RBH). The ABH states that only the high boundary before the ambiguous constituent influences attachment whereas the RBH advocates that the high boundary before the ambiguous constituent can only be interpreted according to the relative size of an earlier low boundary. Specific predictions of the two hypotheses were tested. Relationships between attachment results and performance on psychoacoustic tests of gap detection threshold and frequency limen were also investigated. Materials: The experiments were designed on E-Prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA). The sentences were recorded on Praat software (Boersma & Weenink, 2013), controlling for F0, duration of components and pauses between components. The prosodic boundaries were measured with the ToBI coding system distinguishing acoustic measures of intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IPh) boundaries. Methods: Twenty-three normal hearing (NH) adults, 15 NH children and 13 children with CIs who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese participated in a computerized…
author: Fortunato, Talita Maria
keywords: Brazilian Portuguese; children; cochlear implant; prosodic boundary; prosody; syntax
date published: 2015-09-30T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:38Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York