Influence of prosodic boundaries on comprehension of spoken English sentences.

Three experiments investigated the role of prosody in the comprehension of auditory sentences. In Exp. 1 an analysis of three novice talkers and one expert talker verified the production parameters of one type of syntactic ambiguity and showed that pitch cues were more prominent than duration cues. In Exp. 2, 16 listeners used prosodic information to make consistent decisions reliably about phrase boundaries. In Exp. 3, 40 participants listened to sentences in which prosody was inconsistent with later morphosyntactic information, indicated their understanding, and then judged whether a visual target was related to the meaning of the sentence. Inconsistent prosody slowed comprehension and contributed to slower, less accurate judgments of sentence meaning. This suggests that prosodic information contributes to the perception of spoken language and can affect comprehension even when the syntactic structure indicated by prosody is contradicted by subsequent morphosyntactic information.

Vertical similarity in spoken word recognition: multiple lexical activation, individual differences, and the role of sentence context.

Four experiments investigated acoustic-phonetic similarity in the mapping process between the speech signal and lexical representations (vertical similarity). Auditory stimuli were used where ambiguous initial phonemes rendered a phoneme sequence lexically ambiguous (perceptual-lexical ambiguities). A cross-modal priming paradigm (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) showed facilitation for targets related to both interpretations of the ambiguities, indicating multiple activation. Experiment 4 investigated individual differences and the role of sentence context in vertical similarity mapping. The results support a model where spoken word recognition proceeds via goodness-of-fit mapping between speech and lexical representations that is not influenced by sentence context.

Effects of familiarity and aptness on metaphor processing.

A cross-modal priming paradigm was used to examine the comprehension of metaphors varying in familiarity and aptness. In Experiments 1 and 2 high-familiar metaphors showed availability of the figurative meaning, but low-familiar (LF) metaphors did not. In Experiment 3, only LF metaphors that had been rated highly apt showed evidence of figurative activation. Experiment 4 showed evidence of figurative activation for most LF and moderate-apt metaphors. The locus of activation was investigated in Experiment 5 in which the individual words of the metaphor (topic and vehicle) served as primes. Neither topic nor vehicle showed evidence of priming the metaphor target, suggesting that activation of the metaphorical target in Experiments 1-4 was not caused by lexical activation of the words within the metaphors, but rather was due to activation of emergent properties of the metaphorical phrase.