Center-Embedded Sentences

Doubly center-embedded relative clause constructions such as “The rat that the cat that the dog chased killed ate the malt” are notoriously difficult to parse. Many explanations have been offered. This chapter proposes a novel one: an alignment problem at the syntax-prosody interface, consisting of a mismatch between the heavily nested syntactic structure and the flat structure required by prosodic phrasing. Selective shrinking and lengthening of phrases within the sentence can coax the prosodic processor into creating rhythmic packages that fit well with the nested syntactic tree structure. Long outer phrases and short inner ones help with that, while short outer phrases and long inner ones hinder it. The chapter discusses two experiments—reading aloud with facilitation; reading aloud followed by grammaticality judgment—that provide evidence that produced prosody is the causal link between phrase lengths and ease of processing, though not exhibiting a “missing-VP effect” for either sentence type.