This paper addresses the question of the way in which prosodic informa
tion affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. Two
studies were run. The first, based on Beach (1991), dealt with people'
s judgements of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragmen
ts of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of
sentence types with differing prosodic contours. In the first, an effe
ct of prosody was found over short but not over longer sentence fragme
nts; in the second, some evidence was found of a prosodic effect in th
e judgement of normality. The behavioural data are related to acoustic
analyses of the experimental materials. The implications of these stu
dies for current sentence processing models are discussed.