Syntactic Ambiguity and the Role of Punctuation in Disambiguation: Choosing Early or Late Closure
Communicative «reliability» of punctuation design of different syntactic units is tested through a variety of methods, including psycholinguistic ones. The tasks, using sentences with syntactic ambiguity, are suitable for such experimental studies. For example, the subjects deal with a specific pragmatic problem in choosing early or late closure of ambiguous construction with a relative clause [Fedorova et al., 2007]. Our experiment shows that the presence or absence of comma before the relative clause in different priming conditions has different effects on individual interpretation strategies of a certain sentence as well as tempo characteristics of the utterance. The author stresses that the role of punctuation in a sentence processing with the late closure prime is negligible. In a sentence processing without any prime this factor causes enhancement of early closure preference, generally, but there are no significant differences in tempo pronouncing of the sentence segments. In addition, there is no correspondence between a pause and a comma separating the relative clause. It is proved that a comma absence in a sentence with the early closure prime causes tempo slowing down in pronouncing the first part of a noun phrase and reducing preferences of early closure from 100% to 80%. The experiment reveals gender differences in tempo pronouncing of the first part of noun phrases depending on punctuation: women tend to read it slower than men. This effect becomes stronger when the comma precedes the relative clause.