Correlates between Performance, Prosodic and Phrase Structures in Bangla and Hindi: Insights from a Psycholinguistic Experiment

Shallow parsers or Chunkers that create word groups based on local dependencies are considered essential for many NLP related tasks such as Machine Translation, Speech Synthe-sis and Information Retrieval. The linguistic stature of chunks is accepted even though their definition varies with the linguistic theory, specific task and even practical con-cerns of system building. The psychological reality of a chunk in linguistic performance is under-explored for Indian languages. In this study we conduct a set of psycholinguistic experiments in Bangla and Hindi in an attempt to understand how linguistically structured chunks correspond to a naïve native speaker’s perception of chunk in an attempt to understand the correlations between performance and linguistic structures. The results reaffirm the cognitive basis of chunks and show some interesting patterns in their correspondence with linguistic structure. This may have consequences for how speech synthesis models prosodic phrasing and also the computationally appealing notion of a local dependency based chunk.