Phrasing and prominence disambiguate clefted Relative Clauses

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.We investigated how prosody aids in disambiguating it-clefts with Connected Clauses (-Who sang? -It was [the editor] [that sang]) versus Relative Clauses (-Who called? -It was [the editor [that sang]] ([that called])). Connected Clauses attach high in structure and convey background information, while clefted Relative Clauses, nested within the focused element, introduce new information. The two structures exhibit distinct prosodic patterns in production. Connected Clauses are separated from the clefted element by a prosodic boundary, aligning with prior findings on prototypical clefts and with their syntax. Clefted Relative Clauses, however, are consistently prosodified with the Noun Phrase they modify, indicating syntax-prosody mismatches that involve Relative Clauses may be less widespread than generally assumed, with implications for theories of the syntax-prosody interface. Prominence patterns further inform prosody-semantics mapping theories: clefted Relatives exhibit localized prominence on the rightmost stressable syllable, rather than the whole phrase carrying new information, highlighting the role of intermediate linguistic representations. An auditory comprehension study showed listeners utilize these prosodic cues to overcome the parsing preference for Connected Clauses previously shown by Guo et al. (2023, 2024a). These findings emphasize the critical role of prosody in sentence processing and demonstrate how more complex structural configurations can be leveraged to refine models of prosody.