33 - Prosody in sentence processing

Summary

Introduction

Prosody refers to a grouping within an utterance and the prominence relations between the members within the group. Groupings within an utterance, called prosodic units, are hierarchically organized so that a prosodic unit can include one or more smaller prosodic units. Since the grouping and the prominence relations between the members are often marked by intonation, the terms ‘intonation’ and ‘prosody’ are often used interchangeably. Intonation, though traditionally defined as the global changes in pitch over the course of a sentence or a phrase, has an internal structure. Some pitch events mark the boundaries of groupings, either small or large, while others mark the prominent members within a group. In this way, an intonation contour marks a hierarchy of groupings and reflects the metrical structure of the group. The pitch events marking the internal structure of intonation can be represented by two distinct pitch levels, High (H) or Low (L) and their combinations (e.g. HL for falling and LH for rising). This view of intonation is known as an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation or intonational phonology, started in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the seminal works of Bruce (1977) on Swedish intonation and Pierrehumbert and her colleagues on English intonation (e.g. Pierrehumbert, 1980; Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986; Liberman & Pierrehumbert, 1986; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990).

This model of intonation has been applied to Japanese (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988) and Korean (Jun, 1993), and has been expanded to many other languages including German (Grice & Benzmüller, 1995) and Greek (Arvaniti & Baltazani, 2005; see S.-A. Jun, 2005 for a similar analysis of eight other languages).