A interface prosódia-sintaxe na produção e no processamento de estruturas de Tópico e de SVO

Abstract

This study investigates the role of prosody in syntactic processing. Our hypothesis is that prosody could not only prevent ambiguity, but it also guides the parser, providing cues to the syntactic tree construction during linguistic processing by adults. We elected Topic (of intern argument) and SVO (nontopicalized) structures because in contrast with both of them, the prosodic cues are accessible from the beginning of the sentences in both structures. A set of experiments was conducted according to the following objectives: in production: (a) to verify the prosodic properties of SVO and Topic sentences in reading experiments; (b) to investigate if there is a preference for a default prosody; in comprehension: (c) to verify the preference for each structure by comparing listening reaction time with or without prosodic cues; (d) to verify if the modification of these cues could "trick" the parser choices. For the construction of experimental stimuli, words that may belong to Verb category as well as Adjective category were selected. We built sentences with both types of syntactic tree: Topic – [A criança SUJA]IP a madrinha mandou ela para o banho; and SVO – [A criança]ϕ [SUJA a madrinha] com a comida do almoço. (Topic – The dirty child was sent to have a shower by their godmother; and SVO – The child soils their godmother with the lunch food.) The results of the production experiments revealed that there are acoustic cues which differentiate both types of structure. Furthermore they suggest that there is a preference, when reading it aloud, for SVO prosody production when participants are not aware of the full meaning of the sentences. As regards the comprehension experiments it also showed a preference for SVO structure when prosodic cues are not accessible to the listener. On the other hand, when the prosody is informative, the results suggest that not only it guides the parser in syntactic structure choices, but also it could “trick” and mislead it to the processing of a different structure in the cases of incongruity between syntax and prosody. Altogether the results reveal that, on the one hand, it seems to have a SVO default structure, but, on the other hand, the Topic prosody seems to prevent, in a way, the activation of this default. Having the analyzed structures and based on the experimental results, we indorse that the prosody guides these projections, since the acoustic cues are accessible from the beginning of sentences. According to Bocci’s proposal (2008), Topic properties would be coded in syntax, guiding the syntactic derivation; in turn, these properties would be previously available via prosody. The obtained results are discussed in the light of three theoretical approaches: the Prosodic/Phonological Bootstrapping Hypothesis (MORGAN & DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997; 2008), which holds that prosodic cues promote speech stream segmentation, facilitating linguistic processing (in case of adults); the Integrated Model of Online Computation (CORRÊA & AUGUSTO, 2006; 2007), according to which the syntactic tree is created during the course of processing; and the Auditory Comprehension Model of Language (FRIEDERICI, 2011), which foresees the prosody-syntax interaction on the neurophysiological level.