Course Description
Prosody covers a wide range of phenomena, including intonational structure, rhythm, and stress. The relationship between the phonological grammar and the syntax is complex, as multiple prosodic representations may be compatible with a single syntactic structure. However, there is increasing evidence that speakers and hearers rely heavily on prosodic information during incremental sentence processing, inviting numerous foundational questions for the architecture of the language processing system.
The proposed seminar course addresses several major themes in the current literature on the use prosody, focusing on prosodic boundaries, in sentence processing, including (i) evidence for prosodic and metrical structure in silent reading, (ii) the influence of intonational phrasing on syntactic parsing, ambiguity resolution, and predictive processing, and (iii) evidence for individual and cross-linguistic differences.
We will invite open-ended discussion on how complex linguistic mappings and the resulting representations might be integrated into existing models of sentence processing. We will encourage students to consider what kinds of information the comprehender may have to prioritize during online processing and the extent to which the interpretation of such information may be affected by broader contextual factors, such as speaker intention, as well as how prosodic grouping may interface with other cognitive representations, such as memory. Finally, we will introduce and evaluate various paradigms used in prosodic processing research, including offline questionnaires, structural priming, silent reading, visual world studies, pupillometry, and electroencephalography
Area Tags: Psycholinguistics, Prosody, Syntax, Phonology, Cognitive Science
(Session 2) Tuesday/Friday 3:00pm – 4:20pm
Location: ILC S231
Instructors: Sun-Ah Jun & Jesse Harris
Sun-Ah Jun is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1993. She has also taught at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute in 2001 and 2015, and at the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics Summer School in 2013. Her general research interests are prosody, phonetics, laboratory phonology, and the interface between prosody and the subareas of linguistics. She is especially interested in developing models of intonational phonology of various languages and building a model of prosodic typology, and investigating how prosody encodes syntactic/semantic information and guides sentence processing.
Jesse Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA, where he also holds a joint appointment in Psychology. He received his PhD in Linguistics from UMass Amherst. His research areas broadly include sentence processing, pragmatics, perspective taking, focus, ellipsis, prediction, and the syntax-prosody interface. Much of his recent research addresses how the language processing system integrates prosodic information during language processing using pupillometry as a measure of processing difficulty, as well as the impact of implicit prosody on syntactic disambiguation during silent reading.
