The where and when of linguistic word-level prosody

Abstract

Despite its presence in all natural languages prosodic processing remains under-researched in cognitive science. Hemispheric specialisation for linguistic word-level prosody, specifically, sensitivity to stress typicality was examined using dichotic listening. In Experiment 1, participants named targets and in Experiment 2 participants classified targets as nouns or verbs. In both studies stress typicality effects emerged in the left hemisphere only. These results suggest that: (1) the left hemisphere may be responsible for conveying accurate stress patterns prior to lexical access, (2) supra-segmental information reduces the set of potential candidates during lexical access, and (3) prosody and grammatical category interact in the language processing system.