How can a pause change how a sentence is understood?
Compare saying ‘Let's eat, Grandma’ with the same words run together without the break. Pauses can cue how listeners group speech, though the effect depends on the language and sentence. A Mandarin sentence-processing study offers a specific test of how those cues help some listeners resolve an initially misleading interpretation.
Questions you could explore
- Why might a pause help in one sentence but interrupt the meaning of another?
- How could moving the same pause change the grouping a listener hears in a sentence?
Start reading
- Language and Cognition / Cambridge University PressSpeech pauses facilitate older adults’ comprehension of complex sentences: an EEG study on Chinese garden-path sentence processing
Compares pause-present and pause-absent versions of specific Chinese sentence types with younger and older adults. The authors distinguish this laboratory task from natural speech production.
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