Garden-path no more:How prosody resolves the Complement Clauses / Relative Clauses ambiguity

Prosody has been shown to successfully disambiguate a selected number of garden-path sentences (see e.g. Kjelgaard & Speer 1999; Grillo et al. 2018 and Wagner & Watson 2010 for review). We extend this work by showing that: - Speakers prosodically disambiguate Complement Clauses (CCs: John [told [the woman] [that he was running with Bill]]) and Relative Clauses (RCs: John [told [the woman [that he was running with] [to wait]]). -Moreover, listeners are sensitive to this prosodic disambiguation and can use it to avoid garden-path effects. EXP1: A Planned Production (N=10 English speakers), 24 target sentences shows that speakers make use of both temporal and tonal cues to disambiguate the two readings. EXP2: In a Forced-Choice Comprehension task, 60 participants heard sentence fragments up to (but not including) the disambiguating region of ambiguous CC/RC (e.g. John told the woman that he was running with…) and selected between CC (Bill) and RC (to wait) continuations. Sentences contained prosodic disambiguation consistent with EXP1. Results: Main effect of Prosody (p<.0001). % of RC-choices RC-Prosody: 57.9% CC-Prosody: 25.5% Post-hoc analysis removing 8 outlier participants (who always only selected the CC continuation) showed the prosodically targeted structure being selected equivalently (70%) across conditions.