Local and global structure in spoken language comprehension

Abstract

In three experiments we explore the issue of how listeners use the global and local structural organization of an utterance in the process of language comprehension. We define both local and global structure in terms of their syntactic, semantic, and prosodic properties. Using a word-monitoring task, we find that disrupting any aspect of local structure has a much greater effect on monitoring latencies than disruptions of global structure. However, disrupting the prosodic or syntactic global structure has a more adverse effect on comprehension when the utterance is meaningful compared to when it is semantically uninterpretable. We conclude that listeners develop a representation of a semantically unintelligible utterance on the basis of its local organization and its overall prosodic structure, whereas the representation of a normal utterance is based also on semantic global information.