BIO

My name is Karen Iglesias and I am an undergraduate student at Florida State University, majoring in Psychology with minors in History and Chemistry on a pre-med track. I was born in Havana, Cuba but moved to Miami, Florida at the age of seven. I am interested in Global Health, more specifically mental health and the stigma around mental illnesses. During my free time, I enjoy watching crime documentaries and listening to music. In the future, I plan on completing medical school and becoming a pediatrician.

Role of Implicit Prosody in Syntactic Disambiguation During Silent Reading in Spanish

Abstract

The current study aims to analyze the role of implicit prosody in disambiguating adjective attachment in Spanish speakers of differing language fluency. Implicit prosody refers to the phenomenon that sound representations are activated during silent reading. Other studies have shown that readers can use implicit intonational information to dissolve ambiguous sentences during silent reading. With this study in particular one language was studied, Spanish, in an attempt to find if there are any statistically significant differences between implicit prosody in silent Spanish reading at the intermediate level and silent Spanish reading at the advanced level. Moreover, the study also tests the role of implicit prosody in native Spanish speakers. To create the materials, an alternate group of participants filled out a form with some demographic questions followed by ambiguous sentences. From the resulting norming data a system was established with 3 possible codes, which were then used to quantify the data given by our participants. Due to the ongoing nature of this study, no concrete conclusions can be drawn yet, but future analyses will include more meaningful data and provide a better insight into the difference in implicit prosody across native Spanish speakers and the two different levels of Spanish language fluency (intermediate and advanced).

Keywords: Language, Spanish, Implicit Prosody