Prosody, phonology and parsing in closure ambiguities

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Abstract
Any coherent theory of speech comprehension must account for the ways in which different information sources are combined in the analysis and interpretation of the spoken language input. In this paper, we investigate the relationship primarily of syntactic structure with prosodic and phonological information. In particular, we consider distinctions between early and late closure sentences, in terms both of intonational phrasing and of stress placement on so-called “stress shift” items such as Hong Kong. In previous work, we have found a high incidence of early stress in the late closure context, as in “… Hong Kong problems…”, and of late stress in the early closure context, as in “… Hong Kong, problems…” In the experimental work reported here, we find that stress placement in stress-shift items can be utilised by listenen in on-line comprehension, as reflected in patterns of latencies in a cross-modal naming task. However, shifted stress is not used as a structural cue in cases where it can be motivated by non-structural factors, such as narrow focus on the early stressable syllable (as might be motivated by contrastive emphasis) or the lexicalisation of a form with early stress.

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