UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation is about implicit prosody, the prosodic structure that readers assign during silent reading. The dissertation has several goals: determining which reading tasks are appropriate for studying implicit prosody, establishing how grammatical principles could guide incremental assignment of prosodic structure, and investigating how implicit prosody interacts with other properties such as focus in order to influence syntactic parsing and interpretation. On the methodological side, this dissertation demonstrates that the Maze task is suitable for studying implicit prosody by replicating several major findings on metrical and phrasal prosody in both the Maze task and in self-paced reading. In addition to showing that the Maze is sensitive to implicit prosody, the methodological comparison confirms previously reported advantages of the Maze over self-paced reading, such as more localized and larger effects. On the theoretical side, the dissertation lays the groundwork for developing an incremental model of prosodic parsing. I provide an overview of the major grammatical constraints that govern the syntax-prosody interface, drawing on work from the theoretical phonology literature. I discuss how and when these grammatical constraints, which are typically invoked to model the final phrasing for a complete sentence structure, could be deployed by an incremental parser that assigns a prosodic structure word-by-word. Using a toy model of an incremental parser, I also show how the parser’s first pass implicit prosody may differ from the final prosody, arguing that future work in this area should more closely consider these potential differences. The final set of experiments investigates both the timing of implicit prosodic assignment and how prosodic structure and information structure affect attachment decisions. Based on the results of these experiments, I propose the Visibility First Hypothesis, according to which attachment decisions are determined primarily by prosodic visibility, while other factors such as focus only exert an influence when two potential attachment sites are equally visible. I then outline several experiments to test the Visibility First Hypothesis in future work.