This extensive document, a Doctor of Philosophy dissertation by Nicholas J. Van Handel from UC Santa Cruz, presents an investigation into implicit prosody, which refers to the prosodic structure readers mentally assign during silent reading. The research explores several facets of this phenomenon, including which reading tasks are sensitive to implicit prosody, specifically comparing the Maze task and self-paced reading (SPR) across multiple experiments involving homographs and garden path sentences. Methodologically, the author finds that the Maze task often yields more localized and larger effects compared to SPR, supporting its use for studying prosody. Theoretically, the dissertation lays groundwork for an incremental model of prosodic parsing, discussing how grammatical constraints on the syntax-prosody interface can be applied word-by-word, and examines how constituent length and information structure affect attachment decisions in ambiguous relative clause constructions.

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