Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Listeners must integrate multiple sources of information toconstruct an interpretation of a sentence. We concentrate hereon the alignment of prosodic and syntactic grouping duringonline sentence comprehension. We present the results from apupillometry study on the use of prosodic boundaries in resolv-ing well-known attachment ambiguities. Using growth curveanalyses to capture the non-linear dynamics of pupil dilation,we found increased pupil excursions for sentences that weredisambiguated towards the dispreferred, non-local relation, es-pecially when accompanied by supporting prosodic informa-tion. However, when prosodic and structural information didnot align, pupillary response was muted, potentially indicatinga failure to commit to a specific interpretation. More generally,the study shows how the currently under-utilized pupillometrymethod offers insights into spoken language comprehension.