23.4479, Diss: Cognitive Science/ Phonology/ Psycholing/ German: Kentner: 'Linguistic Rhythm and Sentence Comprehension in Reading'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-23-4479. Fri Oct 26 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.4479, Diss: Cognitive Science/ Phonology/ Psycholing/ German: Kentner: 'Linguistic Rhythm and Sentence Comprehension in Reading'

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Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 23:20:01
From: Gerrit Kentner [gerrit at lingua.uni-frankfurt.de]
Subject: Linguistic Rhythm and Sentence Comprehension in Reading

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Institution: Universität Frankfurt am Main 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2011 

Author: Gerrit Kentner

Dissertation Title: Linguistic Rhythm and Sentence Comprehension in Reading 

Dissertation URL:  http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~kentner/kentnerdiss.html

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Phonology
                     Psycholinguistics

Subject Language(s): German (deu)


Dissertation Director(s):
Shravan Vasishth
Caroline Féry

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation is concerned with the role of prosody and, specifically, 
linguistic rhythm for the syntactic processing of written text. My aim is to 
put forward, provide evidence for, and defend the following claims:


While processing written sentences, readers make use of their 
phonological knowledge and generate a mental prosodic-phonological 
representation of the printed text.


The mental prosodic representation is constructed in accordance with 
a syntactic description of the written string. Constraints at the interface 
of syntax and phonology provide for the compatibility of the syntactic 
analysis and the (mental) prosodic rendition of the sentence.


The implicit prosodic structure readers impose on the written string 
entails phonological phrasing and accentuation, but also lower level 
prosodic features such as linguistic rhythm which emerges from the 
pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.


Phonological well-formedness conditions accompany and influence the 
process of syntactic parsing in reading from the very beginning, i.e. 
already at the level of recognizing lexical categories. At points of 
underspecified syntactic structure, syntactic parsing decisions may be 
made on the basis of phonological constraints alone.


In reading, the implicit local lexical-prosodic information may be more 
readily available to the processing mechanism than higher-level 
discourse structural representations and consequently may have more 
immediate influence on sentence processing.


The process of sentence comprehension in reading is conditioned by 
factors that are geared towards sentence production.


The evidence from three reading experiments (oral reading and silent 
reading with eyetracking) supports these points and suggests a model 
of grammatical competence in which constraints from various domains 
(syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse structure, and phonology) 
interact in providing the possible structural, i.e. grammatical 
descriptions. The performance data from the experiments are modeled 
as an incremental constraint satisfaction process in the framework of 
an Optimality Theoretic parsing account. Solely making use of 
constraints derived from competence grammar, the model is capable of 
capturing the data and advocates the simultaneous application of 
syntactic, prosodic and syntax-phonology interface constraints in 
incremental processing. The model predicts that, in the case of 
syntactic indetermination, weak prosodic constraints may decide about 
syntactic ambiguity resolution. The performance-compatible OT 
grammar integrates the processes of syntactic parsing and 
prosodification in reading, hence dissolving the strict separation of 
language production and comprehension. At the same time the OT 
model endorses a bidirectional relationship between syntax and 
phonology in grammar. 






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