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Strings of words can correspond to more than one interpretation or underlying structure, which makes them ambiguous. Prosody can be used to resolve this structural ambiguity. This dissertation investigates the use of prosodic cues in the domains of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration to disambiguate between two interpretations of ambiguous structures when speakers addressed different interlocutors. The dissertation comprises of three production studies and one comprehension study.
Prosodic disambiguation was studied with a focus on German name sequences of three names (coordinates) in two conditions: without (Name1 and Name2 and Name3) and with internal grouping of the first two names ([Name1 and Name2] and Name3). The study of coordinates was complemented with production data of locally ambiguous sentences with a case-ambiguous first noun phrase.
Variability was studied in a controlled setting: Productions were elicited with a within-subject manipulation of context in a referential communication task in order to evoke prosodic adaptations to different conversational contexts. Context had five levels and involved interlocutors in three age groups (child, young adult, elderly adult) with German as L1 in the absence of background white noise, the young adult with background white noise, and a young adult without German as L1. Variability was explored at different levels: within a group of young individuals (intra-group level), within and between young individuals (intra-individual level and inter-individual level, respectively), and comparing between the group of young and a group of older speakers (inter-group level).
Our data replicate the use of the three prosodic cues (f0-movement, final lengthening, and pause) in productions of young adult speakers and extend their use to productions of older adult speakers. Both age groups distinguished consistently between the two coordinate conditions. Prosodic grouping in production was evident not only on the group-final Name2 but also at earlier stages in the utterance, on the group-internal Name1 (early cues). For some speakers, some listeners were able to decode these early cues effectively as they were able to reliably predict the upcoming structure after listening to Name1 only. Thus, prosodic grouping appears as a globally marked phenomenon building up along the utterance. The internal structure of coordinates was disambiguated irrespective of the conversational context. In our data, speakers only slightly modified the prosodic cues marking the disambiguation in the different contexts. Listeners were unable to identify to which interlocutor the sequence had been produced. We interpret this intra-individual consistency in the production of disambiguating prosodic cues as support for a strong link between prosody and syntax. The findings support models in favour of situational independence of disambiguating prosody. All speakers reliably marked the distinction between the grouping conditions with at least one of the three prosodic cues investigated and most of the speakers used at least two of these cues. Further, individual differences in prosodic grouping did not lead to difficulties in recovering the grouping in comprehension. Taken together, these findings support the existence of a phonological category of prosodic grouping.
Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.
Scholarship on the history of advertising has dedicated only a limited atten-tion to all centuries preceding 1700, even though sources and data for a history of an-cient and medieval advertising are consistent. Since the birth of writing, in the Medi-terranean basin as well as in Asia, different forms of branding emerge. Their originalfunction, showing the origin of a product, was quickly subject to a process of differen-tiation. Ancient sources also show an embeddedness of oral and written advertising–advertising became such a crucial component of daily life that it also became a topicof public discourse and poetry. In Roman times, advertising also became an object ofjuridical regulations–while a further process of differentiation took place in theMiddle Ages. The invention of print, finally, allowed a quicker reproduction and dis-tribution of posters, flyers etc.–in forms which had already been practiced for thou-sands of years in other parts of the world, particularly China.
When moral authority speaks
(2023)