Prosodic correlates of pronoun disambiguation in Spanish

Abstract

One of the major challenges in pronominal anaphora resolution occurs when the anaphor is ambiguous. This paper explores the interplay between prosodic features and pronominal anaphora in ambiguous discourse in Spanish. The results for duration, fundamental frequency and amplitude of the segment in the speech signal corresponding to the pronoun, complemented by data on pause occurrence and pause duration, suggest the potential role of prosody in anaphora resolution.

Keywords

• pronominal anaphora
• prosody
• discourse
• Spanish