On the Spoken Disambiguation of Superficially Ambiguous Sentences

A set of sentences containing the phrase good flies quickly in each of two constituent structurings (e.g., the good flies quickly past v. the good flies quickly passed) was read by five trained readers. The recorded readings of this phrase were then excised from the full sentences and presented to two groups of listeners—one group being asked to judge the location of the " sentence break " in each reading, the other group being asked whether good or flies was " most stressed " in each reading. These judgments were then compared with acoustic analyses of the stimuli in order to determine the acoustic cues for these judgments. Contrary to some other researches, the relative peak of amplitude of the words good and flies was found to be the major determinant of both sentence break and stress judgments. Pause durations or pitch contours account for about one-third of the judgments, whereas relative amplitude accounts for 90% of all judgments.