USING PROSODY TO PREDICT THE END OF SENTENCES IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH -NORMAL AND BRAIN-DAMAGED SUBJECTS

In an earlier study (Grosjean, 1983), it was found that listeners of E nglish were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the ''potentially last word'', that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying len gths. The present study investigated this phenomenon in four experimen ts. The first two experiments examined the prediction capabilities of listeners when presented with the whole sentence in segments of increa sing duration and when presented with the potentially last word only. The results indicate that to be able to use prosody to predict the end of sentences correctly, subjects must have reached a point in the sen tence where neither syntax nor semantics can contribute to the predict ion process. The third experiment investigated whether the results obt ained with English can be replicated in French, a language with a very different prosodic structure. It was found that unlike their English counterparts, French listeners were unable to differentiate between se ntences that continued, although they could tell if a sentence ended o r not. Finally, the fourth experiment examined whether left and right hemisphere brain-damaged (LHD, RHD) patients are equally proficient at estimating the length of a sentence. LHD patients behaved like their controls, but RHD patients experienced great difficulty doing the task . This confirms that sentence prosody may well involve the right hemis phere, especially when no other type of linguistic processing is invol ved. The extension of these studies to other types of linguistic mater ial and to other languages is discussed, as is the on-line use of pred iction in language processing.