Abstract for Iglika Stoyneshka, Janet Dean Fodor & Eva Fernández's talk

Warren & Warren meet Marslen-Wilson: Phoneme restoration and speech shadowing for studying prosody in parsing
Iglika Stoyneshka, Janet Dean Fodor & Eva Fernández (Graduate Center & Queens College, CUNY)
March 25, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - ; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

We will report on experiments that made use of the phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970): when white noise is substituted for one or more phonemes in a word, listeners perceive the word as intact and congruent with sentence context. If that word disambiguates an otherwise ambiguous sentence, the phonemes 'heard' will reveal which interpretation was assigned to the sentence.

The advantage of this method is its naturalness (no conscious judgments, no interrupting task, no anomalous sentence/prosody pairings). Subjects typically believe there really was an intact word in the 'noisy' stimulus, and are unaware that in reporting it they are revealing their resolution of a syntactic ambiguity.

In Experiment 1, participants were offered two visually presented words to choose between after hearing the sentence. We then progressively increased response spontaneity by changing the task to post-stimulus sentence repetition (Experiment 2), and on-line speech shadowing (Experiment 3).

Two types of structural ambiguity in Bulgarian were tested, with three different prosodic contours for each. Results showed a powerful effect of prosody on both constructions. Outcomes were quite similar for the three response modes (word-choice, repetition, shadowing), indicating that the influence of prosody is rapid and is independent of awareness of the presence of an ambiguity to be resolved.