INFLUENCE OF PROSODIC BOUNDARIES ON COMPREHENSION OF SPOKEN-ENGLISH SENTENCES

Three experiments investigated the role of prosody in the comprehensio n of auditory sentences. In Exp. 1 an analysis of three novice talkers and one expert talker verified the production parameters of one type of syntactic ambiguity and showed that pitch cues were more prominent than duration cues. In Exp. 2, 16 listeners used prosodic information to make consistent decisions reliably about phrase boundaries. Ln Exp. 3, 40 participants listened to sentences in which prosody was inconsi stent with later morphosyntactic information, indicated their understa nding, and then judged whether a visual target was related to the mean ing of the sentence. Inconsistent prosody slowed comprehension and con tributed to slower, less accurate judgments of sentence meaning. This suggests that prosodic information contributes to the perception of sp oken language and can affect comprehension even when the syntactic str ucture indicated by prosody is contradicted by subsequent morphosyntac tic information.