In spoken language, major prosodic boundaries can be marked by three types of prosodic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Although these cues appear cross-linguistically, their relative weight in signaling boundaries is considered language-specific. However, very little is known about prosodic phrasing in the production of Dutch. Past studies on Dutch prosodic phrasing mostly focused on boundary perception, suggesting that pause is the most important cue in Dutch. The present study examined the use of boundary cues in the production of Dutch utterance-medial intonational phrase (IP) boundaries. We investigated these boundaries in two syntactically different contexts: coordinated name sequences and compound sentences. In both contexts, the IP boundary reflects the syntactic structure of the utterance. In the name sequences, the boundary serves as the only means to disambiguate a global syntactic ambiguity, while in the compound sentences it aligns with a clause ending. Sixteen native Dutch speakers produced the target utterances with or without an IP boundary. We measured pitch height, IP-final and pre-IP-final syllable durations, and pause duration at the boundary. All three types of cues were used to mark IP boundaries, but speakers used the pause cue to a larger extent in the name sequences than in the compound sentences. Additionally, we found that final lengthening was the most consistently used IP boundary-marking cue. Our results thus challenge the notion of pause as the most dominant cue in Dutch. They suggest that pre-boundary lengthening may be the most consistently used cue, at least, from a production perspective.

Line breaks are ubiquitous in continuous text, as in this article. Despite this prevalence, their effects on parsing and interpretation have been markedly understudied in previous research on written language processing. To shed light on these effects, we conducted a self-paced reading and an eye-tracking study in which participants read multiline texts that contained direct object–subject ambiguity, a type of temporary clause boundary ambiguity. Within these texts, we manipulated the placement of line breaks so that they either regularly coincided or clashed with clause boundaries. We hypothesised that this manipulation would cause readers to adjust their parsing strategies and interpretative commitments. Results revealed that the way in which text is segmented through line breaks can significantly affect how readers parse syntactically ambiguous structures. While coinciding line breaks and clause boundaries helped readers arrive at the correct analysis of the ambiguous structures, cases of line break and clause boundary clash led readers down the garden path during online processing, and in some cases also impacted their comprehension. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the importance of text segmentation in real-world settings, such as books, educational material and digital content.

Sentences that have more than one possible meaning are said to be syntactically ambiguous (SA). Because the correct interpretation of these sentences can be unclear, resolving SA sentences can be cognitively demanding for children, particularly with regards to inhibitory control (IC). In this study we provide three lines of evidence supporting the importance of IC in SA resolution. First, we show that children with higher IC resolve more SA sentences correctly. Second, we show that SA resolution is worse on tasks that place higher demands on IC, even for children with high IC. Third, we show that children with higher IC make different types of SA errors than children with lower IC. This study expands understanding of the cognitive skills underlying language and suggests a need to consider task demands on IC when developing educational curriculums.

We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like “While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily”. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (“laughed”), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (“the baby”) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (“dressed”). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.