Titel

The Bird on the Pole by the Pond.
On Three-site NP's,Relative Clauses and Prosody.

Report of the course "The Experimental Study of Language (Deficiencies)" at the Utrecht University.

Eric Auer
Sarah Bernolet
Sanne Bongers
Mirte van Galen

Abstract
Frank Wijnen en Hugo Quené claim that the U-shaped attachment preference pattern is not caused by the recency principle and the predicate proximity principle (Gibson et al. 1996), but by implicit prosody. Research has shown that implicit prosody is used in ambiguity resolution. Wijnen and Quené's theory is, that the second NP in a row of three is not the preferred antecedent of a relative clause because there is no prosodic pattern that expresses this attachment. In their experiments, their hypothesis is confirmed. In this paper, we describe how we tried to make a useful contibution to their research. We did three experiments. In the first experiment we check wether the problem of pronouncing the middle NP occurs only in complex NP's including the relative clause. In the second experiment we copy Wijnen and Quené's production experiment in a slightly different way. Our third experiment tests wether the pronounced sentences from experiment 3 are understood. Experiment one gave few surprises: in a complex NP consisting of three nouns connected by prepositions it is not difficult to accentuate one of them. The results we got for experiment two and three were not as we predicted: disambiguating these sentences by means of prosody seems to be a very difficult task. So maybe it is not prosody that helps us to choose an antecedent for relative clauses.

1.Introduction
Frank Wijnen & Hugo Quené based their research on earlier research on relative clause attachment. Several researchers have tested what would happen when people are confronted with ambiguous relative clauses, i.e. relative clauses with more than one possible head or antecedent (e.g. "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony). The researchers are all eager to know which one of the possible nouns people choose when confronted with a structural ambiguity like that. When comparing the attachment preferences across several languages, researchers discovered that attachment preferences differed somewhat across languages (Mitchell & Cuetos, 1988): in some languages (e.g. Spanish) people tend to attach the relative clause to the first possible antecedent (= high-attachment tendency), whereas in other languages (e.g. English) people opt for the most recent noun, the one that is closest to the relative clause (= low-attachment tendency). The strange thing is that there seems to be no obvious typological criterion that aligns with these attachment preferences.
Moreover, the high-attachment tendency violates the recency principle. The recency principle is found in research on many kinds of structural ambiguities. The RC attachment ambiguity is the only principle that shows exceptions to this tendency: in several languages the first attachment site is the preferred one, not the most recent one. A possible explanation for this can be that, when it comes to RC attachment, the recency preference is modulated by another principle. According to Gibson et al. (1996), recency preference is modulated by a second structural parsing principle: predicate proximity. The principle of predicate proximity makes people choose for an attachment as close as possible to the head of the predicate phrase when they are confronted with more than one possible attachment site. In other words, when people have to choose from more than one attachment site, two principles are at stake: recency preference and predicate proximity. The first principle makes people choose the last noun as head of the relative clause, whereas the second principle makes them choose the first possible head. The strongest principle, the one that guarantees the least costly attachment, wins. Gibson et al. speculate that predicate proximity is a parameterized structural principle and that its strength is related to word order strictness: the tendency is stronger in free word order languages than in languages with a strict word order. In other words: when a language has a strict word order, it is less likely that the predicate proximity principle will win the race for the attachment.
To test their hypothesis on the predicate proximity principle, Gibson et al. explore the relative clause attachment preferences in a three-site context. Example:

(1)

The apple

next to the sandwich

with the cheese

that tastes very good.
If they are correct about the two conflicting principles, the preference function in a three-site context will be non-monotonous: irrespective of the relative preference for the marginal sites, the intermediate site will be less preferred than the marginal ones. The intermediate site (e.g. the second in a series of three sites) is neither the most recent one nor the one that is closest to the head of the predicate phrase; it has the two principles working against it and that's why the attachment preferences in a three-site context form a U-shaped pattern.
The results of their experiments show that the attachment preferences are indeed not monotonous: the preferences for the first and the last noun vary across languages and, more important, attachment to the second noun is always least preferred. The problem, however, is that Gibson et al. can't generalize their hypothesis on the predicate proximity principle as a parameterized structural principle. It is true that in some languages the strength of the principle aligns with the word order strictness (e.g. in Spanish and in English), but there are several languages in which contrary results are found (e.g. Brazilian Portuguese). These results have led Frank Wijnen & Hugo Quené to the conclusion that "In general the proposed principle of Predicate Proximity appears to be somewhat shaky or ad hoc." (2000: 11).
Frank Wijnen & Hugo Quené want to give an alternative explanation for the U-shaped preference pattern that Gibson et al. found. They think that implicit prosody (or rather: the limitations of prosodic phrasing) has a great deal to do with this U-shaped pattern.
Several studies have shown that prosody helps people to understand language. Prosodic structures like intonation, phrasing and rhythm influence the processing of spoken language: a pause signals where a sentence ends, intonation is used to mark what is important. A number of studies have shown that people tend to rely on prosody to understand sentences that contain local or global ambiguities: prosodic phrasing and focus accents, for example, can have strong effects on attachment decisions (Schafer, Carter, Clifton & Frazier 1996, [see Wijnen & Quené, 2000: 3]). When listeners are confronted with a relative clause with two possible antecedents, they tend to attach the relative clause to the noun that is marked by prosody.
Prosody does not only influence the processing of spoken language: several studies have shown that prosody has its effects on visual language processing too. Some researchers assume that people compute a phonological representation of what they are reading and that this representation encodes prosodic characteristics of the read materials (e.g. Bader, 1999). Readers give an "implicit" prosodic structure to written language. The information provided by this prosodic structure can help readers whenever they are confronted with structural ambiguities.
This brings us back to the experiments of Frank Wijnen & Hugo Quené. As stated before, they are convinced that the U-shaped preference pattern from the Gibson et al. experiment can be explained by implicit prosody. Wijnen & Quené noticed that the problem with the sentences in the Gibson et al. experiment ( NP1 - prep - NP2 - prep - NP3 - RC ) is that it is highly difficult to set the middle NP apart prosodically. You can single out the first and the last noun by using prosodic boundaries: a boundary after the first noun sets the first noun apart from the other two nouns, a boundary before the last noun sets the first two nouns apart from the last one. In this way you can mark these nouns as head of the RC. If you want to single out the second noun, you need to use two boundaries and by doing that, you set the three nouns apart. Of course there are still other ways to mark the intended RC-attachment prosodically ( pitch accent ), but Wijnen & Quené suppose that the second noun cannot be "felicitously and acceptably made prominent by pitch accent" and that leaves them with the conclusion that "by prosody alone, marking the middle NP in a three-site context as head of a subsequent relative clause is impossible, or at least higly unnatural" (2000: 12). Because people have no prosodic pattern that "favors" or "selects" the second NP, RC-attachment to this noun is less preferred. According to Wijnen & Quené, the implicit prosodic structure makes readers choose the first or the last noun as head of the relative clause and they are convinced that this is why the attachment preferences in a three-site context form a U-shaped pattern.
To prove their hypothesis, Wijnen & Quené conducted 4 experiments. In experiment 1 & 2, a questionnaire and a continuous grammaticality judgment procedure, they try to replicate the Gibson et al. experiments. Before they go deeper into the matter, they check whether they too find a non-monotonous attachment preference function in three-host constructions. Experiments 3 & 4 concentrate on the role of prosody in RC-attachment: experiment 3 is a speech production study and experiment 4 is an auditory questionnaire. By means of these experiments Wijnen & Quené want to investigate whether prosodic phrasing can be used to signal the intended RC-attachment in a three-site context. They want to see whether people are able to disambiguate these three-host constructions by using prosodic features. They expect that people are able to do so, but only when the relative clause has to be attached to the first or the last noun. On top of this, they want to see whether people succeed in communicating the intended RC-attachment to others. Experiment 4, the auditory questionnaire, investigates whether listeners can perceive the intended RC-attachment when the sentences are disambiguated by means of prosody.
We based our research on those two experiments (experiments 3 and 4 from the Wijnen & Quené-study). Our research consists of three experiments: two speech production tests and one auditory questionnaire. In the first speech production test we confront people with series of three nouns, linked together by prepositions (NP1- prep - NP2 - prep - NP3). The structure of these complex noun phrases is the same as the noun phrases in the Wijnen & Quené-experiment, without the relative clause. We ask people to read these complex noun phrases aloud and to make one of the three nouns more prominent than the other ones. We conduct this experiment to check whether people can set the middle noun apart by means of prosody. In this way we can see whether people have a prosodic pattern that "selects" the middle noun in a series of three as the head of a complex noun phrase. We do this in order to check whether there only arises a pronounciation problem when a complex noun phrase like that is combined with a relative clause. If problems arise when people have to pronounce these complex noun phrases, it is obvious that it isn't the relative clause that is the problematic factor. If they have no problems, the problematic factor must be the disambiguation of the complex NP with the relative clause.
In the second experiment we used test sentences that are comparable to the test sentences that are used in the Wijnen & Quené-experiment ( NP1 - prep - NP2 - prep - NP3 - RC ). The only difference is that we used a different method to convey the intended RC-attachment. Wijnen & Quené signaled the intended RC-attachment either through number agreement of the auxiliary verbs in the RC with one of the three antecedent noun phrases (experiment 2) or by underlining one of them (experiment 3). We think that these methods influence the behavior of the subjects. When you force agreement between one of the noun phrases and the relative clause, it is no longer necessary to disambiguate the sentences by means of prosody. According to us, people will try less hard to mark the intended RC-attachment prosodically if it is already marked otherwise, either by agreement or by underlining. And that's not a good thing when you are looking for prosodic patterns. We tried to keep the sentences globally ambiguous, so that the subjects have no other choice than to make use of prosody to mark one of the noun phrases. The test sentences are presented with an instruction that elicits one of the three noun phrases (e.g.:"Maak duidelijk dat het het hondje is dat we zo leuk vonden." ["Make clear that it is the puppy that we liked very much."] is the instruction for the sentence: "Het lied over het kind met het hondje dat we zo leuk vonden." ["The song about the child with the puppy that we liked very much"] ). In this way we don't need to use visual or grammatical means to mark the intended RC-attachment. We think that because we use globally ambiguous sentences our results will differ from the results in the Wijnen & Quené-experiment.
In the third experiment we listen to the recordings of the first two experiments. You can compare this experiment with experiment 4 in the Wijnen & Quené-study. There are two differences. One is, that the sentences listened to are not pronounced by a phonetically trained speaker, but by the subjects. Te second difference is, that in this experiment, we are our own subjects. Without looking at the instructions, we check whether we can perceive which one of the three noun phrases is marked by prosody (experiment 1) or which noun phrase is marked as the head of the relative clause (experiment 2).
In fact, our research is more or less the same as what Wijnen & Quené did. We try to refine the research method, but we are no trained researchers yet. Nevertheless, we want to see whether we can replicate their findings, using globally ambiguous sentences.

2.The material
In our experiment our goal is to find out if it is true that there is no prosodic structure for sentences in which the RC is attached to the second of three NPs.
The basic material we made has the following form: [NP, Prep, NP, Prep, NP, RC]. Example:

(2)

Het lied

over het kind

met het hondje dat we allemaal zo leuk vonden.

The song

about the child

with the dog

that we all liked so much.
But to use any sentence of this form would not be sufficient. There are certain conditions that the sentences have to satisfy in order to be usable for our experiment. To get pure results we have to minimize influences like semantics or sentence length.
The first condition is a semantic condition. For every NP in the sentence it must be equally semantically plausible to attach to the RC. So

(3)

De lamp

boven de tafel

naast de vrouw

die niet goed in het interieur past.

The lamp

above the table

next to the woman

that does not go with the interior.
is not a good sentence to use, because a woman is not a thing that does or does not belong in an interior. To be sure we used the right words, we did a pretest for this condition. This pretest will be discussed in the next section.
The second condition was the condition that every NP is equal in length. Previous research has shown that the length of words in sentences has influence on the prosody. We want only the structure of the sentence to have influence on prosody, not length. So we had to make sure every NP had the same length. The length we use for the NPs was one or two syllables.
The length of the RC also matters. We divided the RCs in the material into two groups: one of five or six syllables and one of nine or ten syllables. By doing this we make a little sidestep in our experiment: we are also able to examine the difference between long and short RCs.
A third condition on the material involves attachment between the NPs. If we want to examine attachment of the NPs to an RC, the NPs must not be attached to each other, because that would reduce the choice of three NPs to two. This is the case in
(4) De roman

met de tekstvan de schilderdie ik erg goed vind.
The novelwith the text

by the painterI like very much.
In this sentence you can see 'de tekst van de schilder (the text by the painter)' as one thing to which can be referred. But the reader has to see the three NPs as separate things. This is why we didnÂ´t use the word 'van': it gives the wrong effect.
Also it must not be possible for the third NP to control the first NP. When the first and third NP would be connected, this would mean that the second NP is less favourable in any case. An example

(5)

De filmmet de acteur

over de stuntmandie populair was.

The movie

with the actorabout the stuntman

that was popular.
In this sentence, it is the movie that is about the stuntman, so the actor will be less salient. In our material we have avoided this connection between the first and third NP as much as possible.
When a sentence satisfies all the above conditions, and is of the right form, it can be used for our material. We have succeded in making 48 sentences. They can be found in the appendix.
The sentences described above are the sentences that are used for experiment 2 and 3. The sentences used for experiment 1 are the same sentences without RC.
For an experiment to be valid fillers have to be used. If there are no fillers, the experiment will become to predictable for the subjects, which may influence the results. The fillers have to resemble the real material, so the same instruction can be used for them.
For the first experiment we used two kinds of fillers. They have the following forms: [NP, Prep, NP, Prep, NP, Prep, NP] and [NP, Verb, NP, NP].
For the second and third experiment we used fillers of this form: [NP, Prep, Adj, NP, RC] and [Adj, NP, Prep, NP, RC]. We also used two kinds of ambiguities.

3.Pretest
To verify the suitability of the experiment items, a pretest was done. As explained above, we first threw out items where, according to our intuition, it was plausible that the first and the third NP would belong together.
The pretest was an offline plausibility rating experiment: 23 people filled in a questionnaire on the web, giving the plausibility for each of the three attachments for each potential experiment item. The goal was to remove items that showed a clear bias towards one or two of the attachment possibilities.
Given the sentence

(6)

De acteur in de film over de stuntman die populair was.

The actor in the movie about the stuntman that was popular.
the three cases to rank would be:

(7)

De acteur die populair was.

(8)

De film die populair was.

(9)

De stuntman die populair was.
The ranking was done on a scale from one (bad, not plausible) to five (good, plausible) for each of the cases. The instructions asked to tell how good each of the "words" (we avoided the technical term NP) would fit the relative clause, and the subjects were encouraged to give the same score for more than one case if appropriate. The complete questionnaire can be found on the web¹. When gaps were found in the questionnaire, all three cases of the concerning sentences were removed from the data for that questionnaire.
After collecting enough results, a statistical measure was computed from the logged data of the questionnaires. For this, the data was first normalized: The mean for each subject was subtracted from all values, so that the new mean would be zero for each subject. Then, the values were scaled to give a standard deviation of one. In this way, individual differences in the general treating of the questionnaire were removed. If, for example, one subject considers ranking three as normal and one and five as bad and good, while another one thinks most cases are good for a ranking of four, and never worse than three, the further evaluation would have been biased without the normalization.
After the normalization, the mean and standard deviation were calculated for each case of each sentence, using the data of all questionnaires together. This data was used for additional checking of the results by hand: One sentence was removed by hand: Though all three attachment possibilities were similar in plausibility there, the overall plausibility of the cases (De puree/De schaal/De taart waar over gemorst is) was quite bad (average of -1.15).
The main check, however, was done automatically: For each sentence, an F-value telling how strongly the three cases differed was computed from the data. Then, the sentences were sorted using that value, giving a list with F-values from 0.02 to 6.17. All sentences with a value of more than 2.4 were removed, as well as the generally implausible sentence mentioned above. Our selection of p=0.1 was done to reject even items with a low possibility of bias towards one or two of the possible attachments. Finally we had 48 experiment items remaining for the use in the two production experiments.

¹ http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~eric/fw-exp/MateriaalTaal.html

4.Experiment 1
Methods
Subjects: Six unpaid students took part in this experiment (4 women, 2 men). All of them were native Dutch speakers. None of them took part in the pretest.
Materials: See the sections on the material and the pretest for the selection of the experimental sentences and the fillers. In the appendix is a list of the used material.
In this experiment we used the selected experimental sentences, but without the relative clause. So the subjects were given sentences with the grammatical structure NP1-prep-NP2-prep-NP3.
Procedure: Three different lists were constructed by a computer program that randomly assigned the three different cases of every single sentence to a list. This means that although all of the subjects were given the same sentences, subjects with a different list never had the same instruction for a particular sentence. There was no restriction for the number of instructions for a certain NP within a list, so that is why those numbers sometimes are a bit unbalanced. The experimental sentences were pseudo-randomly intermixed with the fillers, so that there never were more than three fillers or more than two experimental sentences in a row. Each list had a different order. Each list was given to two subjects.
The experiment took place in a soundproof evironment. Subjects were given a general instruction that explained that they had to make clear which word was important in a (fragment of a) sentence by means of their prosody (see appendix). Everything was presented on a computer screen and the subjects were able to decide themselves when they were ready for the next sentence (by way of clicking on a 'next'-button on the screen). Each sentence had a specific instruction that showed the word that they had to make prominent.
The utterances of the subjects were recorded on a DAT-tape.
Data analysis: The recorded signal was analysed by us (all untrained listeners). In principle we did not use the computer for acoustic analysis, but for the utterances of three subjects the computer was used for extra information. We scored in the categories 'high pitch', 'low pitch', 'loud', 'quiet', 'stretched words', 'breaks between words' and 'the number of times the sentence was pronounced' (we told the subjects that they could repeat the sentence as much as they wished). We did not use a statistical analysis for this experiment, because there was not enough time to do that.

Results
Because there were some individual differences between the subjects in the way they pronounced the sentences, we analysed the data first for each subject. In this section you will find a table with results for each subject. The first column shows the figures of the sentences that had an instruction to make the first NP prominent, the second column shows the figures of the sentences with a NP2-instruction and the third column shows the figures of the sentences with a NP3-instruction. The numbers in parentheses are the amount of experimental sentences with a certain NP-instruction. The words on the left denote the different categories that are listed under 'data analysis'. There has been made a distinction in NP-prep (the preposition before the NP), NP-det (the determiner of the NP) and NP-noun (the noun of the NP) if necessary. Categories that did not show up in all of the utterances of a subject are not listed in the tables. The categorie 'remarks' is used to give extra information.
Words with two syllables that had a high pitch first syllable and a low pitch second syllable, were counted as 'high pitch' (because it 'sounds' high). Words with two syllables that had a low pitch first syllable and a high pitch second syllable, were counted as 'low pitch' (because it 'sounds' low).

Subject 1 (list 1)

A) Although in six cases the NP3-noun was not the only part of the sentence that had a high pitch, in four of these cases the NP3-noun was still higher than the rest of the sentence.
Results
This subject shows a consistent pattern. The NP that is important is made prominent by pronouncing its noun in a loud and high pitched way. There are some sentences with a NP3-instruction that have a high pitch NP1-noun as well as a high pitch NP3-noun. It could be that the noun of NP1 is easier made high pitched, as a kind of default. There are also a few sentences with a NP2-instruction that show a low pitch NP3-noun, this could be because the subject does not consider the experimental sentences as fragments of sentences. Whole sentences have a low pitch at the end of the sentence. The subject does not use breaks.

Subject 2 (list 1)

A) There were two cases where the NP1-noun was not the only part of the sentence that was loud, but in one of these cases the NP1-noun was still louder than the rest of the sentence.
B) There were ten cases where the NP2-noun was not the only part of the sentence that was loud; in five of these cases the NP2-noun was louder than the rest of the sentence and in one case the NP1-noun was louder than the rest of the sentence.
C) There were ten cases where the NP3-noun was not the only part of the sentence that was loud, but in six of these cases the NP3-noun was still louder than the rest of the sentence.
Results
This subject shows the same pattern as subject 1, although it is a little less clear. NP's are made prominent by pronouncing the noun louder and with a high pitch. Half of the sentences with a NP2-instruction have a loud NP1-noun as well as a loud NP2-noun. But in half of these latter cases, the NP2-noun is louder than the NP1-noun. Also a lot of the sentences with a NP3-instruction have a loud NP1-noun and a loud NP2-noun, as well as a loud NP3-noun. But again, in a lot of these cases the NP3-noun is the loudest one. The sentences with a NP2-instruction and the sentences with a NP3-instruction both have a few cases where the NP1-noun has a high pitch (as well as the intended NP-noun).
There are some examples of the use of stretching to denote the intended NP, in sentences with instructions for NP1 or NP2. It seems sentences with a NP1-instruction have the most straight-forward pattern. If NP1 really is the easiest sentence to produce, this is what would be expected. About breaks: If there is a break in sentences with a NP1-construction, this break is located between the first and the second NP. If there is a break in sentences with a NP2-construction, this break is located between the second and the third NP. There never are any breaks in sentences with NP3-instruction (there cannot be a break after NP3).

Subject 3 (list 2)

A) Although in four cases the NP1-noun was not the only part of the sentence that had a high pitch, in two of these cases the NP1-noun was still higher than the rest of the sentence.
B) Although in two cases the NP2-noun was not the only part of the sentence that had a high pitch, in one of these cases the NP2-noun was still higher than the rest of the sentence.
C) There was one sentence (with a high NP2-noun and a high NP3-noun) where the NP3-noun was the highest part of the sentence and there was another sentence (with a high NP1-noun and a high NP2-noun) where the NP2-noun was the highest part of the sentence.
Results
The pattern of the sentences with a NP1- or NP2-instruction is more or less the same as the pattern of the first two subjects: the noun is higher and louder. Specific for this subject is that there is a low pitch NP3-noun in most of the sentences, regardless of the instruction. So the subject drops his voice at the end of the 'sentence', sometimes even before the NP3-noun. There are a few cases in which the sentences with a NP1-instruction not only have a high pitch NP1-noun, but also a high pitch NP2-noun.
The sentences with a NP3-instruction do not have a clear pattern. The noun that is high most of the times is the noun of NP2. The NP3-noun has a low pitch most of the time, but that is probably because the subject drops his voice at the end of a sentence. It is true that the NP3-noun is more often loud than the noun of the other NPs, but there are only 5 cases (of 16 sentences) where the NP3-noun is loud.
Remark: If a preposition is pronounced high and loud, it is nearly always the preposition 'naast' (next to).

Subject 4 (list 2)

A) Although in two cases the NP1-noun was not the only part of the sentence that was loud, in one of these cases the NP1-noun was still louder than the rest of the sentence.
B) In nine cases both the NP1-noun and the NP2-noun were loud, in seven of these cases the NP2-noun was still louder than the NP1-noun.
C) Although the NP3-noun was loud just as many times as the NP1-noun, in nine cases the NP3-noun was louder than the NP1-noun.
Results
The general pattern here is the same as the pattern of the other subjects, although this subject makes more use of louder NP-nouns than of higher NP-nouns. Sentences with a NP2- or a NP3-instruction have a loud NP1-noun (as well as a high noun of the intended NP) most of the times, but generally the intended NP-noun is louder. There are some cases of sentences with a NP2-instruction where a part of the NP3 is high pitched, which is remarkable.
Sometimes the whole NP3 is quiet in sentences with a NP1- or NP2-instruction. The breaks show the same pattern as the breaks of subject 2: The breaks in sentences with a NP1-construction are located between the first and the second NP. The breaks in sentences with a NP2-construction are located between the second and the third NP. There never are any breaks in sentences with NP3-instruction.

Subject 5 (list 3)
A) Although in five cases the NP1-noun was not the only part of the sentence that was loud, in four of these cases the NP1-noun was still louder than the rest of the sentence.
B) In all of the sentences both the NP1-noun and the NP2-noun were loud. In two of these cases the NP1-noun was higher than the NP2-noun and in three cases the NP2-noun was higher than the NP1-noun.
C) In two cases the NP1-noun was the loudest part of the sentence, in one case the NP2-noun was the loudest part of the sentence and in six cases the NP3-noun was the loudest part of the sentence.
Results
Sentences with a NP1-instruction have a straightforward pattern: the NP1-noun is again louder and higher than the rest of the sentence.
In sentences with a NP2-instruction there is far less use of pitch, compared to sentences with a NP1-instruction. In all of the NP2-sentences the NP1-noun and the NP2-noun have a high pitch. The preposition of NP2 is also loud most of the times. Sometimes the NP3-noun is stretched. So this pattern is different from the other subjects, although it has been noticed before that the NP1-noun gets a stress most easily (high pitch or louder).
In sentences with a NP3-instruction there is no use of pitch at all. The volume is remarkable, because most of the times all three nouns are loud, although sometimes the NP3-noun is the loudest one. So this is also a different pattern.
The subject does not use breaks.

Subject 6 (list 3)

A) There was one sentence where both the NP1-noun and the NP2-noun had a high pitch, but the NP2-noun was higher.
B) There were nine cases where the NP3-noun was not the only part of the sentence that had a high pitch; in three of these cases the NP3-noun was still higher than the rest of the sentence.
Results
Generally the pattern is the same as the pattern of the other subjects: the noun of the intended NP is louder and higher than the rest of the sentence. This is most easily recognized in the sentences with a NP2-instruction. The NP1-sentences sometimes have a high pitch NP2-noun (3 times) as well as a high pitch NP1-noun. Sometimes the NP1-noun is stretched.
The pattern of sentences with a NP3-instruction is a little bit less clear: the NP1-noun is also loud in a lot of cases and sometimes it has a high pitch.
The noun of NP3 has a low pitch in some NP1- and NP2-sentences. There is little use of breaks.

General results of experiment 1
The subjects are quite consistent, in most of the cases an important noun is designated by a loud and high pitch noun. There are of course some individual differences, but there seems no reason to suppose that it is more difficult to make a prosodic structure for sentences with a NP2-instruction. If there is an instruction that makes it difficult to make a prosodic structure, it seems more likely that this is a NP3-instruction. And maybe a NP1-instruction is the easiest to follow (but it is too early to conclude all this).
It seems that the noun of NP1 is easily stressed by way of a loud voice or a high pitch, even if there is a NP2- or NP3-instruction. Some subjects drop their voice at the end of the 'sentence' (NP3). Two subjects had the same pattern for breaks: a break after NP1 in a sentence with a NP1-instruction, a break after NP2 in a sentence with a NP2-instruction and no breaks in sentences with a NP3-instruction. But the other four subject did not use breaks very much.

5.Experiment 2
Methods
Subjects: Six unpaid students took part in this experiment (4 men, 2 women). All of them were native Dutch speakers. None of them took part in experiment 1 or the pretest.
Materials: The same experimental sentences as in experiment 1 were used, but now with the relative clause. So the subjects were given sentences with the grammatical structure NP1-prep-NP2-prep-NP3-RC. The fillers were different (see the section on the material).
Procedure: The same computer program was used to generate the three different lists for this experiment. The instructions were different from the instructions in experiment 1 (see appendix).
Data analysis: We scored in the same categories as in experiment 1, but we left the relative clause out of consideration. The prosody of the relative clause was quite consistent: most of the times the pitch went up at the beginning of the relative clause and down at the end of the sentence.
Results
The tables that are used for the results of experiment 2 are more extensive than the tables in the section about experiment 1. Also there are three tables for each subject. Because of this complexity we put these tables in the appendix for those who are interested in them. In this section we will just describe the results for each subject.
Subject 1 (list 1)
This subject does not use volume differences at all. There are differences in pitch, but it is difficult to draw conclusions from that fact. The sentences with a NP1-instruction have a high pitch NP1-noun and a high pitch NP3-noun most of the times, although the NP1-noun generally has a higher pitch than the NP3-noun. The NP2-preposition is low in pitch.
The sentences with a NP2-instruction generally have three high pitch nouns and actually the NP1-noun is more often high than the other NP-nouns! In the few cases that the NP2-noun or the NP3-noun is not high, it has a low pitch.
The sentences with a NP3-instruction have a high pitch NP1-noun and a high pitch NP3-noun in all of the cases. There is a high pitch NP2-noun in half of the cases and a low pitch NP2-noun in the other half of the cases. So, at first sight it seems easier to make a prosodic structure using pitch for the sentences with a NP1-instruction than for the other sentences (but there may not be enough NP1-sentences to draw such a conclusion).
Concerning the breaks: Sentences with a NP1-instruction generally have a break after NP1 and after NP3. Sentences with a NP2-instruction can have breaks after all the NP's, but a break after NP3 happens most often. In half of the sentences with a NP3-instruction there is a break after NP2.
It is difficult to draw conclusions. The subject produces quite melodic sentences, but there do not seem to be really clear patterns. Maybe the pattern for the breaks is fuzzier in the NP2-cases than in the other two cases.

Subject 2 (list 1)
This subject has a quite consistent pattern, but unfortunately the pattern is consistent for all of the sentences, irrespective of the type of instruction. The NP1-noun and the NP3-noun are generally high, but the NP2-noun has a high pitch in a lot of cases as well. If the NP2-noun or the NP3-noun is not high, then it is low most of the times. There are too few breaks to say anything about a pattern.
Subject 3 (list 2)
Pitch: In sentences with a NP1-instruction generally the NP1-noun and the NP3-noun have a high pitch, although the NP1-noun is higher most of the times. In some cases the NP2-noun is high as well. There is a low pitch NP2-preposition a lot of times and sometimes also a low NP2-determiner. In sentences with a NP2-instruction the NP1-noun and the NP2-noun almost always have a high pitch. These sentences also have a high NP3-noun most of the times. There is a low pitch NP3-preposition in nearly half of the cases and sometimes there is a low pitch NP2-preposition or a low pitch NP3-determiner. In sentences with a NP3-instruction all of the nouns are high. Sometimes the NP2-preposition, the NP2-determiner, the NP3-preposition or the NP3-determiner has a low pitch.
Loudness: Sentences with a NP1-instruction have a louder NP1-noun. NP2 and NP3 are generally quiet. Sentences with a NP2-instruction have a loud NP2-noun in nearly half of the cases and a loud NP1-noun in one third of the cases. The NP3 is quiet most of the times.
In half of the cases, sentences with a NP3-instruction have a loud NP1-noun. Also, half of the NP3-sentences have a loud NP3-noun.
Stretching: In sentences with a NP1-instruction the NP1-noun is stretched in half of the cases. In sentences with a NP2-instruction sometimes the NP1-noun or the NP2-noun is stretched. In sentences with a NP3-instruction the NP3-noun is stretched in nearly half of the cases and the NP1-noun is stretched in one third of the cases.
Breaks: There are quite a lot of breaks. In sentences with a NP1- or a NP2-instruction most breaks are after NP3. In sentences with a NP3-instruction most breaks are after NP2.
Conclusions: It seems a sentence with a NP1-instruction is the easiest to make a prosodic structure for. In these sentences the NP1-noun is more often high than the other nouns and it is loud and stretched most of the times. The patterns for NP2- and NP3-sentences are far less clear. There is some pattern in the breaks (after NP3 for NP1- and NP2-instructions and after NP2 for NP3-instructions) and in the parts of the sentence that are quiet (NP2 and NP3 are quiet for NP1-instructions and only NP3 is quiet for NP2-sentences).

Subject 4 (list 2)
Pitch: Sentences with a NP1-instruction nearly always have a high pitch NP1-noun, but they also have a high pitch NP3-noun most of the times. Likewise, sentences with a NP2-instruction nearly always have a high pitch NP2-noun, but they also have a high pitch NP3-noun most of the times. Sentences with a NP3-instruction always have a high pitch NP3-noun, but there are also some cases where the NP1-noun or the NP2-noun is high.
Loudness: Sentences with a NP1-instruction generally have a loud NP1-noun and in some cases they have a loud NP3-noun. Sometimes there is a quiet NP3-determiner and NP3-noun. Sentences with a NP2-instruction generally have a loud NP2-noun and in some cases they have a loud NP3-noun. Sometimes there is a quiet NP3. Sentences with a NP3-instruction generally have a loud NP3-noun and in some cases they have a loud NP2-noun.
Stretching: In sentences with a NP1-instruction the NP3-noun is stretched half of the times and the NP1-noun is stretched nearly as much. In sentences with a NP2-instruction the NP2-noun is stretched most of the times, but the NP3-noun is also stretched a lot of times. In sentences with a NP3-instruction the NP3-noun is stretched most of the times, but there also are some cases of a stretched NP2-noun.
Repeated sentences: This subject repeats sentences a lot. Sentences with a NP3-instruction have the least repetitions.
Breaks: Sentences with a NP1-instruction nearly always have a break after NP3 and they have a break after NP1 in half of the cases. Sentences with a NP2-instruction have a break after NP2 and after NP3 most of the times. Sentences with a NP3-instruction have a break after NP3 most of the times and sometimes they have a break after NP2.
Conclusions: The prosody of this subject looks much more like the prosody of the subjects in experiment 1. The NP's that have to be attached to the relative clause have a high volume, a high pitch and they are stretched, although the other nouns in the sentence may have some of the properties of the attached NP's as well. If you consider the number of repetitions, the NP3-attachment should be the easiest one to make a prosodic structure for. Each condition shows a different pattern for the breaks.

Subject 5 (list 3)
Pitch: Sentences with a NP1-instruction have a high pitch NP1-noun in nearly all the cases, but there also are quite some high pitch NP3-nouns. If the NP3-noun is not high, it generally is low. There are also some low pitch NP2-prepositions. Sentences with a NP2-instruction have a high pitch NP2-noun most of the times, but they have nearly as much high pitch NP3-nouns. There are some low pitch NP2-prepositions. Sentences with a NP3-instruction show more cases of a high NP3-noun than high NP1- or NP2-nouns.
Loudness: In sentences with a NP1-instruction the NP1-noun is loud most of the times, in sentences with a NP2-instruction the NP2-noun is loud most of the times and in sentences with a NP3-instruction the NP3-noun is loud most of the times.
Stretching: In sentences with a NP1-instruction the NP1-noun is stretched in more cases than the other nouns (there are also some stretched NP3-nouns). In sentences with a NP2-instruction the NP2-noun is stretched in more cases than the other nouns. In sentences with a NP3-instruction the NP3-noun is stretched in more cases than the other nouns.
Breaks: Sentences with a NP1-instruction have a break after NP3 most of the times, but there also are some breaks after NP1. Sentences with a NP2-instruction have very little breaks and sentences with a NP3-instruction do not have breaks at all.
Conclusion: Generally volume is used to show which NP is attached to the relative clause. There is also some use of pitch and stretching. Only the sentences with a NP1-instruction have a lot of breaks and those are after NP3 most of the times (although some are after NP1).

Subject 6 (list 3)
Pitch: Sentences with a NP1-instruction generally have a high pitch NP1-noun, sentences with a NP2-instruction generally have a high pitch NP2-noun. Sentences with a NP2-instruction can have a high pitch NP1-noun and a high pitch NP3-noun.
Loudness: Sentences with a NP1-instruction have a loud NP1-noun. Sentences with a NP2-instruction have a loud NP2-noun, but also a loud NP1-noun in quite some cases. Sometimes there is a quiet NP3. Sentences with a NP3-instruction have a loud NP3-noun.
Stretching: There are a few stretched NP1-nouns in the NP1-condition, some stretched NP2-nouns in the NP2-condition and a few stretched NP3-nouns in the NP3-condition.
Repetitions: Most repetitions are in the NP2-condition, but there also are a lot of repetitions of the sentences with a NP1-instruction. There are no repetitions in the NP3-condition.
Breaks: In sentences with a NP1-instruction there are a few breaks after NP1. In sentences with a NP2-instruction there are breaks after NP2 and also some breaks after NP3. In sentences with a NP3-instruction there are little breaks (but there are little sentences as well).
Conclusion: The patterns of this subject look a lot like the patterns in experiment 1. Most of the time she uses pitch and volume and sometimes there is use of stretching. If you consider the number of repetitions, the attachment that is most difficult should be an attachment to the NP2 and the easiest one should be an attachment to the NP3.

General conclusions experiment 2:
We did not really look at the difference in prosody for long relative clauses compared to short relative clauses any more, but the length of the sentence does not seem to influence the prosody.
Generally this experiment seems to be a lot more difficult for the subjects than experiment 1. Sometimes there are different patterns for the different instructions (there are examples of the use of pitch, volume or stretching), but these patterns differ across the subjects. There are no general patterns for all of the subjects. There are even subjects whose prosody does not show different patterns at all. But if there is a pattern, it usually shows resemblance to the pattern we found in experiment 1.
There are some differences between the three conditions concerning the breaks. Sentences with a NP1-instruction show a little more breaks after NP1 and NP3. Sentences with a NP2-instructions show some more breaks after NP2 and NP3. Sentences with a NP3-instruction some more breaks after NP2. But again, the individual differences are large. Some subjects do not use breaks at all.
The conclusion of this experiment is that we have not found clear prosodic patterns for the three different instructions. The results may perhaps indicate that it is a little easier to make a prosodic structure for sentences where the NP1 is attached to the relative clause, but it certainly does not support the hypothesis that it is more difficult to make a prosodic structure for sentences with a NP2-attachment than for sentences with a NP1- or NP3-attachment.

6.Experiment 3
After completing the production experiment, we did a small perceived attachment test. This was mainly to verify that the subjects were indeed able to conceive pronounciation patterns that would enable a listener to get the right understanding of the sentences or fragments.
Each possible attachment of each test item had been uttered by two different subjects in each of the two production experiments (with and without relative clause). Now, each of the recordings was listened to by two of us (only the native speakers of us did this work).
This has the disadvantage that we as perceivers are biased by knowing what the experiment is about. For example we know that there is always exactly one NP most important. But as we did not memorize the way the three possible cases were assigned to the speakers and there were no other clues about this either, the experiment setup was still realistic enough. Again, the goal of this experiment was only to verify that the subjects did manage to convey the NP selection only using their voice.
The results were logged using questionnaires of roughly the same design as the ones used for the pretest: For each item, we selected for each of the three cases how much we believed that this case was the intended one. The scales had a 1 to 5 range each. Normally, we would select 5 for the perceived attachment/stress and 3 for the others, but the scale system allowed to describe less clear cases as well.
As with the pretest, each set of results (one of us listening to one speaker) was normalized to a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 before doing further processing on it. The rationale for this is the same as for the normalization in the pretest. In our case, the results were mostly uniform, so the normalization shifted the mean by 3.6 and scaled the results by about 1.1 in most cases.
From the 192 data points ( 4 x 48 ) for each intended attachment/stress for each of the two experiments, we computed the mean and standard deviation of how much we believed in each of the three possible intensions. The results are as follows (mean, with standard deviation in parentheses):

	Production task without relative clauses
Intended:	Perceived:

	NP1	NP2	NP3
NP1	1.420 (0.287)	-0.673 (0.233)	-0.701 (0.010)
NP2	-0.702 (0.009)	1.445 (0.101)	-0.702 (0.009)
NP3	-0.665 (0.269)	-0.603 (0.436)	1.170 (0.628)

	Production task with relative clauses
Intended:	Perceived:

	NP1	NP2	NP3
NP1	1.239 (0.694)	-0.677 (0.174)	-0.505 (0.603)
NP2	-0.186 (0.913)	0.473 (1.008)	-0.373 (0.742)
NP3	-0.462 (0.661)	-0.435 (0.675)	0.926 (0.963)

At first glance, the data in the tables still gives the impression that perception of the intended stress/attachment was not easy but possible: It seems that for the experiment without relative clauses, perception of the intension NP3 stressed leads to most uncertainity. For the experiment with relative clauses, we get an impressive amount of uncertainity while trying to perceive the intended attachment for the NP2 attachment, while the other cases seem to pose only medium difficulty for the listener.
The F-values² calculated for each line of the tables predict far more problems: For the experiment without relative clauses, the F-values per intension are NP1=10.653, NP2=146.024, NP3=1.628 , and for the experiment with relative clauses NP1=1.263, NP2=0.081, NP3=0.341.
This can be interpreted to say that if there was a relative clause at all of if the speaker tried to stress the third NP in a list of NP1 prep NP2 prep NP3, the listener has only a minimal chance to do significantly better than guessing to perceive the intended stress/attachment correctly!
Analyzing the data for each subject gives a more optimistic picture: If there was no relative clause, half of the subjects could make the intended stress clear, and two of the other three could do so at
least for the first and second NP. If there was a relative clause, however, most subjects could not
convey the intended attachment by prosody. One subject could stress attachment of the first or middle NP, another subject could stress attachment of the last NP, and there were some weak effects for the last NP with the former subject and the first NP with the latter subject and another third subject. The other three subjects could not give us any prosodic clues that we could perceive significantly better than guessing their intentions.

Let M be the mean of the means of a line, then we have MSB = sum_i (mean_i-M)² and MSW=sum_i (192 * stddev_i²) and F = (189 * MSB) / (2 * MSW)

7.Conclusions

The general hypothesis our experiments are based on is the hypothesis that prosody helps in disambiguating three-site NPs. And that the second noun will not be chosen to be attached to the relative clause because there is no prosodic pattern that attaches the relative clause to this noun. Frank Wijnen and Hugo Quené's research confirmed this hypothesis. The question now is: do our experiments, which are almost the same, also confirm the hypothesis?
We did experiment 1 to be sure the problem of making the second noun prominent occured only in NPs with relative clause. The results in this experiment were very clear: either one of three nouns can be made prominent by means of prosody. So the conclusion for this experiment supports the general hypothesis: the problem only occurs with relative clause, and not without.
Drawing a conclusion for experiment 2 and 3 proves to be more complicated. With experiment 2, we repeated the production experiment Frank Wijnen and Hugo Quené did. The only change we made, is that we used a different method to convey the intended RC-attachment. We did not want to disambiguate the sentences the subjects saw by number agreement or underlining, because it might influence the subjects. We did not expect to get totally different results. But we did. There was no pattern for NP2-attachment, but there was no pattern for NP1- and NP3-attachment either.
We did experiment three to find out if the subjects had succeeded in pronouncing the sentence in such a way the intended meaning would be understood. The results of this experiment supports the results of experiment 2: the sentence meanings were not clear at all.
What conclusion can we draw from these results? There are some possibilities. The first would be that the task we gave to the subjects was simply to hard to do. This means the subjects just didn't know what to do, which explains the random results we got. But all the subjects told us after the instruction they understood the task, so this explanation would be quite strange.
Another explanation could be that our method of experimenting was not right. We tried to conduct a valid experiment that really says something about the topic in discussion, but we are not trained researchers. We could not find if we did something wrong, but the possibility is there.
If we assume that the subjects did understand the task and we did use good methods, what could we conclude then? The results point out that it is impossible to disambiguate NPs of the form [NP1, prep, NP2, prep, NP3, RC] by means of prosody. This is exactly the opposite to the conclusion of Wijnen and Quené. So our results say maybe they are wrong. Maybe prosody alone is not the whole story. If one can not disambiguate these sentences by means of prosody, then it is not because of prosody that we do not choose NP2. Maybe it's possible in other kinds of ambiguous sentences, but not in this case.
To draw this conclusion would be very drastic. It has been proved that ambiguous sentences are disambiguated with prosody. It would be totally opposite to Wijnen and Quené's research. So maybe we have to steer towards some middle course, where prosody has a role to play, but not one as big as in our hypothesis. An idea would be that people always have the tendency to take two NPs together in their prosodic pattern (so NP1-NP2, or NP2-NP3) and is this why NP2 can not be made prominent. But to really find out anything about this would require new research.
So because of our fuzzy results we can not draw a definite conclusion. Maybe we found evidence against Frank Wijnen and Hugo Quené's conclusions, or maybe we just conducted an invalid experiment.

References

Bader, M:
Prosodic influences on reading syntactically ambiguous sentences.
1999, in J.D. Fodor and F. Ferreira, Reanalysis in sentence processing.
Cited by Wijnen and Quené (2000)

Cuetos, F. and Mitchell, D.C.:
Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of late closure strategy in Spanish.
1988, Cognition 30
Cited by Wijnen and Quené (2000)

Gibson, E:
Linguisic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies.
1996, Cognition 59
Cited by Wijnen and Quené (2000)

Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N.J., Canseco-Gonzalez, E. and Hickok, G.:
Cross-linguistic Attachment Preferences: Evidence from English and Spanish
1994

Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N.J. and Torrens, V.:
Recency and Lexical Preferences in Spanish.
1999, Memory and Cognition 27

Miyamato, E.T., Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N.J., Aikawa, T. and Miyagawa, S.:
A U-shaped Relative Clause Attachment Preference in Japanese.
1994, Language and Cognitive Processes 14

Schafer, A., Carter, J., Clifton, C. and Frazier, L.:
Focus in relative clause construal.
1996, Language and Cognitive Processes 11
Cited by Wijnen and Quené (2000)

Wijnen, F. and Quené, H.:
Prosodic Prhasing and Relative Clause Attachment in a Three-site Context
2000

Appendices
A: Tables of experiment 2
For each subject there are three tables. The first table shows the characteristics of the sentences that had an instruction to make the first NP prominent, the second table shows the characteristics of the sentences with a NP2-instruction and the third table shows the characteristics of the sentences with a NP3-instruction. The numbers on the first line are the numbers of the experimental sentences (counted without the fillers).
The letters in the categorie 'remarks' mean:
A = The noun of NP1 was the word in the sentence with the highest pitch.
B = The noun of NP2 was the word in the sentence with the highest pitch.
C = The noun of NP3 was the word in the sentence with the highest pitch.
D = The noun of NP1 was louder than the other words in the sentence.
E = The noun of NP2 was louder than the other words in the sentence.
F = The noun of NP3 was louder than the other words in the sentence.
The numbers on the right side of the table denote the amount of sentences with the property that is scored (the first number is the number of sentences with this NP-instruction).

Subject 1
Table NP1:

Table NP2:

Table NP3:

Subject 2

Table NP1:

Table NP2:

Table NP3:

Subject 3:

Table NP1:

1) Only the NP3-preposition and the NP3-determiner have a low pitch, the NP3-noun has not.

Table NP2:

2) Only the NP2-preposition and the NP2-determiner are quiet, the NP2-noun is not.

Table NP3:

Subject 4:

Table NP1:

Table NP2:

Table NP3:

Subject 5:

Table NP1:

Table NP2:

Table NP3:

Subject 6:

Table NP1:

Table NP2:

Table NP3:

B: List of used sentences
1. De gietervoor de plant op de kast      die ik lelijk vind.
2. De acteur in de film over de stuntmandie populair was.
3. De foto bij de uitleg voor de mixer   die niet bruikbaar was.
4. De romanmet de tekstover de schilder die ik erg goed vind.
5. De raketin de grot onder de basis  die zeer geheim was.
6. De appelnaast de tosti met de kaas     die heel lekker smaakt.
7. De krantmet de sloganvoor de show    die verboden is.
8. De vogelop de paalnaast de vijver die we niet zagen.
9. De jas  in de fietstasop de fiets     die verdwenen is.
10. De man  naast de wegdoor de wijk    die men liever mijdt.
11. De speelkaart in de stapel op de tafel     waar mee geknoeid is.
12. De koe  voor de schuur bij de villa    die in het weiland staat.
13. De deken uit de mand voor de kat     die vuil geworden is.
14. De hoes om de banknaast de leunstoeldie ik uitgezocht heb.
15. De fiets op de boot aan de steiger  die net geschilderd is.
16. Het mes onder het bordnaast het glas  dat we gekocht hebben.
17. De jockey in de wedstrijdop de racebaan  die wereldberoemd is.
18. De brug naar de poortin de stadsmuur die te bezoeken is.
19. De kaarsop de tafelnaast de bank   die ik heb gekregen.
20. De schroef in de dakgoot boven de deur   die ik moet vervangen.
21. De karaf naast de lepelin de kom       die de ober vergat.
22. De rolstoel in de auto naast de jeep   die niet meer kan rijden.
23. De duiker in de boot met de mast     die langzaam ouder  wordt.
24. Het theater bij het filmhuis boven het cafe dat de studenten erg leuk vinden.
25. De vrouw uit de stad met de moskee   die de mooiste van de wereld is.
26. De foto op de poster op de brug      die werd beschreven in de roman.
27. De gids voor de tocht over de berg    die grote indruk op ons maakte.
28. De kritiekop de column uit de krant    die ik aandachtig gelezen heb.
29. De bankpasuit de beurs in de jas       die vorige week gestolen is.
30. De vulling voor de pen uit de schrijfsetdie de journalist verloren heeft.
31. De zin  in de proef met de uitkomst die nogmaals bestudeerd moet worden.
32. De aanvaltijdens de strijd tegen de tirandie in alle boeken genoemd wordt.
33. De vesting in de stadaan de kust     die populair is bij toeristen.
34. De gloeilampin de lantaarnnaast de fakkel die je in het donker goed kunt zien.
35. De asbaknaast de flesmet de roos     die er al meer dan twee weken staat.
36. Het liedover het kindmet het hondje  dat we allemaal zo leuk vonden.
37. Het standbeeldin het parkop het eiland   dat vaak bezocht wordt door toeristen.
38. De boot op de werfbij de haven    die al jaren niet meer gebruikt wordt.
39. Het pleinvoor het paleisbij het stadje  dat nog uit de Romeinse tijd stamt.
40. De springvorm naast de bekermet de vloeistof die ontzettend heet geworden is.
41. De snuifdoos in de kastnaast de spiegeldie verderop als antiek verkocht wordt.
42. Het tijdschriftmet het verhaalover het probleem dat werd genoemd in de show op TV.
43. De eik  achter de molenbij de beek     die treffend geschilderd is door Rembrandt.
44. De ruiterop de hangbrug boven de rivier die zichtbaar was vanaf de hoge berg.
45. De rivier achter de kapelop de heuvel    die bekend is uit de dikke reisgids.
46. De lamp boven de tafel naast de bank   die niet erg goed in het interieur past.
47. De bloem in de vaas op de kast      die weerspiegelde in de winkelruit.
48. De sleutelvoor de vitrinemet de armband  die te goed zichtbaar is voor inbrekers.

C: Subject instruction pages
Experiment 1
Bedankt voor je deelname aan dit spraakproductie-experiment.
Je gaat zometeen zinsfragmenten uitspreken die op het computerscherm gepresenteerd worden.
Iedere keer als je op de knop doorgaan klikt, verschijnt er een tekstfragment op het scherm. Boven dit fragment staat een woord uit deze zin genoemd. De bedoeling is dat je de zin zo uitspreekt, dat een luisteraar kan horen dat dit het belangrijkste woord is.
Enkele voorbeelden:
De rozen

Marie gaf de rozen aan haar moeder

Deze zin kun je zien als het antwoord op de vraag:
Wat gaf Marie aan haar moeder?
Als je deze zin uitspreekt, moet dus duidelijk naar voren komen dat het de rozen zijn die Marie aan haar moeder gaf.
De trui

De vlek op de trui van het kind op de fiets

Deze zin kun je zien als het antwoord op de vraag:
Op wat van het kind op de fiets zat de vlek?
Als je deze woordgroep uitspreekt, moet dus duidelijk naar voren komen dat het de trui is waar de vlek op zat.
Lees elk item eerst een keer goed door. Spreek het daarna uit. Als je je vergist, mag je het opniew proberen.
Als je klaar bent met een zin, klik je op doorgaan om naar de volgende zin te gaan.
Als eerste volgt nu een testzin. Als dit goed gaat en je hebt verder geen vragen meer, kun je met het experiment beginnen.
Als je nog vragen hebt, stel die dan. Wij kunnen het horen door de koptelefoon.
Succes!
naar de testzin

Experiment 2
Bedankt voor je deelname aan dit spraakproductie-experiment.
Je gaat zometeen zinsfragmenten uitspreken die op het computerscherm gepresenteerd worden.
Als je zometeen op 'doorgaan' klikt, verschijnt er een tekstfragment op het beeldscherm. Elk fragment kan op verschillende manieren opgevat worden.

De spion zag de man met de verrekijker.

Deze zin kan je lezen op de volgende manieren:
De spion zag de man met behulp van de verrekijker.
De spion zag de man, die een verrekijker vast had.
Boven elk fragment staat hoe je het moet opvatten.
Bijvoorbeeld:
Maak duidelijk dat het de koe is die in het weiland staat.

De koe voor de schuur bij de villa die in het weiland staat.

De bedoeling is dat je het fragment uitspreekt. Uit de manier waarop je het uitspreekt moet een luisteraar kunnen opmaken dat het de koe is die in het weiland staat.
Lees elk item goed door. Spreek vervolgens het fragment uit. Als je je vergist, mag je het opnieuw proberen. Klik op 'doorgaan' om naar de volgende zin te gaan.
Als eerste volgt nu een testzin. Als dit goed gaat en je hebt verder geen vragen meer, kun je met het experiment beginnen.
Als je nog vragen hebt, stel die dan. Wij kunnen het horen door de koptelefoon.
Succes!
naar d e testzin

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