Using prosody to predict the end of sentences in English and French: Normal and brain-damaged subjects

Author(s): Hirt, C.

Journal/Book: Lang Cognitive Process. 1996; 11: 27 Palmeira Mansions, Church Rd, Hove, E Sussex, England BN3 2FA. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc Ltd. 107-134.

Abstract: In an earlier study (Grosjean, 1983), it was found that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the ''potentially last word'', that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. The present study investigated this phenomenon in four experiments. The first two experiments examined the prediction capabilities of listeners when presented with the whole sentence in segments of increasing duration and when presented with the potentially last word only. The results indicate that to be able to use prosody to predict the end of sentences correctly, subjects must have reached a point in the sentence where neither syntax nor semantics can contribute to the prediction process. The third experiment investigated whether the results obtained with English can be replicated in French, a language with a very different prosodic structure. It was found that unlike their English counterparts, French listeners were unable to differentiate between sentences that continued, although they could tell if a sentence ended or not. Finally, the fourth experiment examined whether left and right hemisphere brain-damaged (LHD, RHD) patients are equally proficient at estimating the length of a sentence. LHD patients behaved like their controls, but RHD patients experienced great difficulty doing the task. This confirms that sentence prosody may well involve the right hemisphere, especially when no other type of linguistic processing is involved. The extension of these studies to other types of linguistic material and to other languages is discussed, as is the on-line use of prediction in language processing.

Note: Article F Grosjean, Univ Neuchatel, Lab Traitement Langage, Ave Premier Mars 26, CH-2000 Neuchatel, Switzerland

Keyword(s): RIGHT-HEMISPHERE; REACTION-TIME; CONTINUOUS SPEECH; PHONEME TARGETS; PERCEPTION; STRESS; DISTURBANCES; RECOGNITION; LANGUAGE; CUE

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