Lyn Frazier and Edward Gibson, eds. Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing: Studies in Honor of Janet Dean Fodor. Berlin: Springer, 2015. x, 307 p., ill. ISBN 9783319129600. US $179.00 (hardback).
Humanists, who likely associate the term prosody with poetics, may be fascinated to discover that prosody has a robust existence and empirically driven history in relation to ordinary text and language use. Indeed, there is an entire field, psycholinguistics, which presents significant insights about the sound representation of language, of which one component is prosody. For humanists, it should be of great interest to know that psycholinguists explore both the explicit prosody of oral language as well as the implicit prosody of written texts; they hypothesize that even texts existing only on the page or screen possess a sound representation (i.e., a phonological dimension) that is potentially, and unconsciously, activated by individuals, whether in silent or in oral reading. Because this phonological dimension has both literal and metaphorical import for the notion of “voice,” including the reported subjective experience of “inner voice,” as well as the claim that specific texts possess or lack “voice,” this volume presenting “state of the art” (1) insights into the field should be of interest to humanist scholars in a range of disciplines dealing with either the generation or the processing, comprehension, and criticism of natural-language texts: for example, creative writing, rhetoric and composition, education, disability studies, English studies, comparative literature, theater, and performance studies.
The fourteen essays in this festschrift, dedicated to Janet Dean Fodor, a pioneer in the discipline, overlap without being cumulative. Collectively, they provide substantial evidence that the phonological encoding of text is relevant to our perceptual processing and performance of oral and/or written language: from the parafoveal preview of homophonic words while the visual input is degraded (163) to the priming of individuals with recordings that strip the lexical content from an utterance but retain its prosodic contours (181), these studies present empirical evidence that many neurotypical individuals tend to process or to produce language more efficiently and effectively (i.e., with fewer errors and/or better global comprehension) when phonological information is made available.
The essays, which follow the IMRAD format (Introduction, Methods, Results, [and] Discussion) of the social sciences are evenly divided into two sets. (Humanities scholars: you can, without too much loss, skip the methods sections detailing experimental design and focus on results and discussion.) The first set involves explicit prosody, that is, the production and analysis of prosodic contours, whether in “read speech,” “spontaneous speech,” or “‘laboratory speech’ (speech created for use in experiments)” (265); the second set involves implicit prosody, that is, “a prosodic structure [a reader projects] onto what is read silently” (12).
One central question that the volume poses is whether the implicit prosody of a sentence, that is, its “projected prosodic structure may affect the interpretation of a sentence” (12). This question matters, as numerous essays demonstrate, to the correct parsing of potentially ambiguous syntactic structures, such as garden-path sentences (e.g., While Mary was mending the sock fell off her lap [178]) and extraposed phrases. The question also affects pragmatic issues, such as the inferential judgments that listeners or readers make as they map a speaker’s prosody to their intentions (e.g., “It looks like a ZEbra” and it is a zebra vs. “It LOOKS like a zebra” but it isn’t [see 104-5]).
Another key question is whether the two kinds of prosody – explicit and implicit – are the same. Such a question has tremendous implications for the study of writing (even if the volume itself does not take up these questions). For example, we might well ask what it means for a writer like Robert Frost if explicit and implicit prosody are not the same, or if they are not the same for all individuals. If they are not the same, or if individual difference affects a reader’s experience of “inner voice,” then questions about the success or failure of a writer or a text to communicate “voice” – i.e., “Never if you can help it write down a sentence in which the voice will not know how to posture specially” (Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, 666) – not only implicate the technical skill of the writer but also involve the pristine inner experience of the reader. Similar questions, of course, pertain to texts that claim to have “voice” (i.e., fiction) or that are required to exhibit voice (i.e., original student expository compositions).
Indeed, some of the intriguing studies presented in the volume suggest that there may be a similarity but “not … a one-to-one match between overt and implicit prosody” (282), particularly with regard to read-aloud and silently read speech. Also, while the experience of implicit prosody is hard to assess, it is unlikely to be universal; rather, “individual differences” (283) must be taken into account; these differences, understandably, have implications for decisions from classroom pedagogy to literary criticism.
Humanists coming to this volume – which offers cross-linguistic and cross-modal investigations of an array of “grammatical issues … processing issues—and brain representation … concerning explicit and implicit prosody” (2) – will take away an enriched understanding of the components of explicit and implicit prosody (i.e., phrasing, accentuation, and rhythm) and the markers that contribute to them (e.g., lexical stress, pitch-accent, head-marking and edge-marking). They will also receive important cautions that certain elements like pauses may not always be prosodic but may at times involve planning limitations (i.e., “performance”), rather than prosody (i.e., “grammatical representation” [119]), the takeaway being that the two kinds of features are, in measurable ways, empirically distinctive (see 128).
In short, humanists will find an array of data from fMRI, eyetracking, and other empirical strategies to engage, support, and even confound their notions of how prosodic contours affect the perceptual experiences of reading texts silently or aloud. For scholars typically focused upon matters of textual interpretation, this attention to processing may be a healthy tonic.
While individual interests will determine which essays are the most useful, it may be safe to say that many readers of SHARP News – in particular, individuals invested in the history of reading – will be fascinated by the chapters by Charles Clifton, Jr. (“The Roles of Phonology in Silent Reading: A Selective Review”) and Mara Breen (“Empirical Investigations of Implicit Prosody”), which present considerable evidence that readers are able to: first, access not only segmental and lexical content but also suprasegmental information as they read; and, second, presumably hear “an inner voice while reading” and that this inner voice is “richly prosodic” (169). Likewise, literary critics and creative writers will be interested in Bo Yao and Christoph Scheeper’s article, which offers fMRI evidence of brain representations substantiating that even in silent reading “direct speech [i.e., first-person speech] is more likely to evoke mental simulations of voices or voice-related representations than indirect speech” (298).
The pivotal payoff for all readers may be a point made in Shari R. Speer and Anouschka Foltz’s chapter but variously borne out throughout the book that prosodic complexity slows individuals’ response times and involves more complex processing. In short, explicit or implicit prosody that is experienced as complex and dense – as the prosody of a poem or a dramatic soliloquy may be – makes important contributions (that we can now empirically recognize) to what James Longenbach calls in The Resistance to Poetry “the notion that we read for the resistance, not in spite of it” (xii). Recognizing the role of speech prosody in cognitive processes, in particular in silent reading, not only complicates our understanding of what “reading” is: it also enriches our notions of how texts that utilize prosody aesthetically engage us as much in the way in which they mean as they do in their actual meaning(s).
Natalie Gerber
State University of New York at Fredonia
