Choe, Wook Kyung. 2015. The effect of interpretation bias on the comprehension of disambiguating prosody. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 21.3. 495-516.

 Although interpretation biases are not frequently assumed in studies of prosodic disambiguation, research on syntactic processing indicates that the two possible meanings of a syntactically ambiguous sentence are not equally plausible. The goal of the current study is to investigate the effect of interpretation bias (which of the two meanings is preferred) and bias strength (how strongly one meaning is preferred to another) on the comprehension of disambiguating prosody. Thirty-two listeners were asked to identify a speaker’s intended meaning using disambiguating prosodic cues, which were produced by multiple untrained speakers. The results showed an effect of bias strength on the listeners’ performance on prosodic disambiguation: listeners more successfully identified the intended meaning for strongly-biased sentences than the intended meaning for weakly-biased sentences. The results from further analyses also revealed that listeners’ strategies to disambiguate an ambiguous sentence using prosody varied depending on its bias strength. (Dong-A University)