Prosody Disambiguates String-Identical Connected Clauses and Relative Clauses

We investigated whether prosody disambiguates Clefts containing string identical Connected Clauses (CC, 1) and Relative Clauses (RC, 2) in English. RCs in (2) are nested within the element they modify and in focus. CCs (1) carry given information and attach higher in the structure. -Who was laughing? -It was [the editor] [CC that was laughing] -Who called? -It was [the editor [RC that was laughing]] ([CC that called]) Exp1: A Planned Production (N=8) study revealed clear tonal and durational differences at multiple regions. Exp2: To test whether these prosodic cues disambiguate the two readings, 64 participants judged the acceptability of auditorily presented sentences in response to preceding contexts and questions which elicited either a CC or RC reading. The prosody of the target sentences either matched or mismatched the context, leading to a 2(Context: CC vs. RC)*2(Prosody: Match vs. Mismatch) design. Matched prosody was accepted more often (85%) than mismatched prosody (59%; p<.01), indicating listeners’ sensitivity to the prosodic differences between the two structures. This effect was smaller for CC structures than for RC ones (p<.01), which suggests that prosodic disambiguation is more important for nested RCs than for non-nested CC structures.