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<Paper uid="H91-1073">
  <Title>THE USE OF PROSODY IN SYNTACTIC DISAMBIGUATION</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The syntax of spoken utterances is frequently ambiguous. Yet listeners usually arrive at something close to the intended meaning. Information listeners might use in disambiguation includes knowledge of the world, shared context, and a source of non-syntactic information that is under-represented in written communication: the prosody of the utterance. By 'prosody' we mean suprasegmental information in speech, such as phrasing and stress, which can alter perceived sentence meaning without changing the segmental identity of the components.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since prosody plays an important role in speech communication, a clear understanding of the mapping between prosodic and syntactic structure would reveal significant aspects of the cognitive processes of speech production and perception. In addition, it would provide guidelines for the synthesis of more natural-sounding speech. Further, any contribution that prosody can make to the resolution of structural ambiguities will be particularly helpful in spoken-language understanding, where lexical and structural ambiguities of written forms are compounded by difficulties in finding word boundaries and in identifying words reliably in automatic speech recognition. Here, we study the mapping between prosody and syntax by minimizing the contribution of other possible cues to the resolution of ambiguity. This study forms the foundation for further work on modeling prosody by assessing a set of syntactic environments in which prosody alone might be used to disambiguate sentences, and by analyzing the correspondence between the phonological and phonetic attributes of the prosodic structure of utterances and their perceived meanings.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We begin by discussing previous work on the relationship between prosody and syntax. We then describe the recording of the corpus, and present results for the experimental studies which consider: (1) the accuracy and confidence of listeners in disambiguating different types of syntactic structures, (2) the phonological analysis of prosodic cues associated with the different structures, and their relation to the disambiguation results, and (3) a phonetic analysis of the phonological markers. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results, and raise some unresolved questions that suggest directions for future research.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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