Forbear is a homophone: Lexical prosody does not constrain lexical access

Contains fulltext : 5943.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Because stress can occur in any position within an English word, lexical prosody could serve as a minimal distinguishing feature between pairs of words. However, most pairs of English words with stress pattern opposition also differ vocalically: OBject and obJECT, CONtent and conTENT have different vowels in their first syllables as well as different stress patterns. To test whether prosodic information is made use of in auditory word recognition independently of segmental phonetic information, it is necessary to examine pairs like FORbear - forBEAR or TRUSty - trusTEE, semantically unrelated words which exhibit stress pattern opposition but no segmental difference. In a cross-modal priming task, such words produce the priming effects characteristic of homophones, indicating that lexical prosody is not used in the same way as segmental structure to constrain lexical access

Prosody as a marker of information flow in spoken discourse

This study concerns the role of prosody in the structuring of information in monologue discourse, from the point of view of production as well as perception. Two prosodic variables were investigated: speech melody and pauses. Melodically, it was found that local intonation features (falling vs. rising tones) are employed to indicate discourse boundaries. On a more global level, speakers appear to use relative height of pitch peaks and of average pitch values as markers of information units. Furthermore, speakers manipulate both the distribution of pauses and their relative length to mark information flow. A perception experiment was carried out to evaluate the perceptual impact of both speech melody and pauses. It was found that, in the absence of semantic cues, both melodic and pausal information is used by listeners to process the incoming signal in terms of discourse structure