Prosodic structure and wh-questions

This study examines the influence of wh-gaps on the prosodic contour of spo ken utterances. A previous study (Nagel, Shapiro, & Nawy, 1994) claimed tha t the phonological representation of a sentence containing a filler-gap dep endency explicitly encodes the location of the syntactic gap. In support of this hypothesis, Nagel et at. presented evidence that the word immediately preceding a gap is lengthened and that there is a reliable increase in pit ch excursion across the gap location. Our study challenges Nagel et al.'s c laim. We argue that their materials confounded the presence/absence of a ga p with other factors that are known to affect intonational phrasing indepen dently. We show that, when these factors are separated, the evidence that s yntactic gaps are explicitly encoded in the phonological representation of a sentence disappears.