Why does a human listener perceive an ambiguous sentence spoken with distinct intonation patterns to have differing meanings?

💡 Explanation

Prosodic bootstrapping allows listeners to use intonation, stress, and rhythm to infer syntactic structure; because the intonation patterns provide cues about phrase boundaries and grammatical relationships, the listener interprets the sentence based on these cues. Therefore, differing intonation leads to differing parsing, rather than just phonetic effects.

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