Phonological Phrase Boundaries Research Articles

Devising Yorùbá Terminology for Phonology Terms (from letter P to letter R)

This essay, which is part three (3) of the report on the formulation of Yorùbá phonology terms from their English counterparts, discusses English phonology terms for letters P, Q, and R and the Yorùbá counterparts, totaling ninety-one (91) terms numbered from 187 to 278.[1] Preceding letters A to O have been discussed in part one and part two of this report, numbers 1 to 104, letters A to G, and numbers 105 to 186, letters H to O, respectively. In this report, we compiled these terms in English, alphabetically arranged, from letter P to letter R, and developed their Yorùbá equivalents. In doing this, we extracted these phonology terms from three phonology textbooks and two specialized/technical dictionaries on linguistics and phonology. We employed the Information Processing Model (IPM) framework. Some of the terms developed are palatalization, ìso̩dàfàjàpè, paragoge ìfìró-bò̩parí, parasitic harmony àǹkóò àfòmó̩, parse ìpínsífó̩rán-ìhun, partial overlapping ìwo̩nú-ara e̩lé̩be̩, phonaestheme fóníìmù-àyo̩túnyo̩, phonemic overlapping ìpòórá fóníìmù, phonological phrase boundary ààlà àpólà fonó̩ló̩jì, phonological prime fó̩nrán-akérépin fonó̩ló̩jì, quantity-sensitive feet è̩wo̩n-atéńté aníwò̩n-agbe̩gé̩, recessive vowel fáwè̩lì àdínkù, redundancy rule òfin aléélè̩
 [1] See Yoruba – The Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria, Volume 12:1, January 2023 and Volume 12:2, June 2023 for the first 2 of the four-part essays.

Increased Pre-Boundary Lengthening Does Not Enhance Implicit Intonational Phrase Perception in European Portuguese: An EEG Study.

Prosodic phrasing is the segmentation of utterances into prosodic words, phonological phrases (smaller units) and intonational phrases (larger units) based on acoustic cues-pauses, pitch changes and pre-boundary lengthening. The perception of prosodic boundaries is characterized by a positive event-related potential (ERP) component, temporally aligned with phrase boundaries-the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). The role of pre-boundary lengthening in boundary perception is still a matter of debate: while studies on phonological phrase boundaries indicate that all three cues contribute equally, approaches to intonational phrase boundaries highlight the pause as the most powerful cue. Moreover, all studies used explicit boundary recognition tasks, and it is unknown how pre-boundary lengthening works in implicit prosodic processing tasks, characteristic of real-life contexts. In this study, we examined the effects of pre-boundary lengthening (original, short, and long) on the EEG responses to intonational phrase boundaries (CPS effect) in European Portuguese, using an implicit task. Both original and short versions showed equivalent CPS effects, while the long set did not elicit the effect. This suggests that pre-boundary lengthening does not contribute to improved perception of boundaries in intonational phrases (longer units), possibly due to memory and attention-related constraints.

Sândi Vocálico Externo no Português Vernacular Santomense / External Vocalic Sandhi in Santomean Popular Portuguese

This paper describes three processes of external vowel sandhi — degemination (DG), elision (EL), and diphthongization (DT) — in São Tomé Vernacular Portuguese (PST). All three processes are found in PST: 32% DG; 36% EL; 52.5% DT. Working with six Santomean informants, we analyzed a corpus of 113 sentences with vowel encounters in word boundaries (V#V). Then, we measured the duration of vowel encounters or the single resulting vowel when the encounter was undone. Factors such as the nature of the prosodic boundaries (phonological word, phonological phrase, and intonational phrase), prosodic stress (lexical and phonological word), and vowel quality are crucial to implementing sandhi processes. However, they occur in different prosodic settings: diphthongization occurs between intonation phrases (IP+IP) as long as their boundary is not limited by a pause. In contrast, elision and degemination occur in phonological word boundaries (ω + ω) and phonological phrase boundaries (ϕ + ϕ). The prominence of the phonological phrase was the preponderant factor in preventing all processes, blocking degemination whenever phonological phrase stress matches with a stressed second vowel. For elision and diphthongization, sandhi was blocked when two stressed vowels co-occurred with the stress of a phonological phrase.

The interaction of focus and phrasing with downstep and post-low-bouncing in Mandarin Chinese.

L(ow) tone in Mandarin Chinese causes both downstep and post-low-bouncing. Downstep refers to the lowering of a H(igh) tone after a L tone, which is usually measured by comparing the H tones in a “H…HLH…H” sentence with a “H…HHH…H” sentence (cross-comparison), investigating whether downstep sets a new pitch register for the scaling of subsequent tones. Post-low-bouncing refers to the raising of a H tone after a focused L tone. The current study investigates how downstep and post-low-bouncing interact with focus and phrasing in Mandarin Chinese. In the experiment, we systematically manipulated (a) the tonal environment by embedding two syllables with either LH or HH tone (syllable X and Y) sentence-medially in the same carrier sentences containing only H tones; (b) boundary strength between X and Y by introducing either a syllable boundary or a phonological phrase boundary; and (c) information structure by either placing a contrastive focus in the HL/HH word (XF), syllable Y (YF), or the sentence-final word (ZF). A wide-focus condition served as the baseline. With systematic control of focus and boundary strength around the L tone, the current study shows that the downstep effect in Mandarin is quite robust, lasting for 3–5 H tones after the L tone, but eventually levelling back again to the register reference line of a H tone. The way how focus and phrasing interact with the downstep effect is unexpected. Firstly, sentence-final focus has no anticipatory effect on shortening the downstep effect; instead, it makes the downstep effect lasts longer as compared to the wide focus condition. Secondly, the downstep effect still shows when the H tone after the L tone is on-focus (YF), in a weaker manner than the wide focus condition, and is overridden by the post-focus-compression. Thirdly, the downstep effect gets greater when the boundary after the L tone is stronger, because the L tone is longer and more likely to be creaky. We further analyzed downstep by measuring the F0 drop between the two H tones surrounding the L tone (sequential-comparison). Comparing it with F0 drop in all-H sentences (i.e., declination), it showed that the downstep effect was much greater and more robust than declination. However, creaky voice in the L tone was not the direct cause of downstep. At last, when the L tone was under focus (XF), it caused a post-low-bouncing effect, which is weakened by a phonological phrase boundary. Altogether, the results showed that although intonation is largely controlled by informative functions, the physical-articulatory controls are relatively persistent, varying within the pitch range of 2.5 semitones. Downstep and post-low-bouncing in Mandarin Chinese thus seem to be mainly due to physical-articulatory movement on varying pitch, with the gradual tonal F0 change meeting the requirement of smooth transition across syllables, and avoiding confusion in informative F0 control.

Prosody-syntax interface and prosodic phrasing in brazilian portuguese

This paper focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese (PB) prosodic phrasing and has two main goals: (1) to find a correlation between the prosodic constituents boundaries, as described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory (Nespor & Vogel, 2007 [1986], a.o.) and the perception and production of spontaneous and reading speech breaks, and (2) to describe the phonological characteristics and the syntactic ranking of perceived and non perceived edges. The corpus under analysis includes 5 extracts both of spontaneous and reading speech lasting about 2 minutes each. The reading speech (LE) emerged from the spontaneous speech (FE) orthographic transcription which was collected from an interview in an informal environment. In the perception test, 11 referees heard the 10 speaking extracts, without punctuation, and marked the perceived breaks in the orthographic transcription of each of them. Both the 5 speakers and the 11 referees were students at UFRJ, born in Rio de Janeiro, and were between 22 and 38 years old.The results point out that the prosodic breaks are mainly perceived at the intonational phrase (I) boundary, regardless of the speech style (FE: 91%; LE 99%). However, in LE, 64% of the foreseen I boundaries, described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory, were perceived as breaks, but in FE, just 37% were perceived. The most usual nuclear contour in both styles is H+L* L% (this being the Portuguese neutral declarative contour), but its occurrence frequency at perceived breaks draws a distinction between LE and FE (67% and 30%, respectively). In FE, contours like L+H* H% and L*+H H% are also produced (34%). In general, descendant nuclei in LE are predominant, as well as the edge tone L; in FE, both the descendant and ascendant nuclei distribution and low or high boundaries are similar. After running a statistic test, the appearance of an L edge, as a predictive for perception, was globally significant. Concerning the syntactic boundary, it was statistically checked and the result points out that breaks are mainly perceived at the matrix phrase limit (LE: 59%; FE: 61%,), showing the endurance of the matrix phrase edge/I boundary mapping. In general, FE has proved to have a bigger variation on the relation of predicted, perceived and produced, as it was expected, which was also confirmed by statistics. Therefore, the results show that the foreseen I phrasing is fairly robust in both styles, once only 13% of the predicted I boundaries have not been produced as so, regarding intonation. Besides, just 1,4% of the predicted phonological phrase (f) boundaries (and produced as Is) were perceived as breaks by the referees. With this study one may conclude that LE and FE share the same prosodic grammar, performed by the same type of phonological/syntactic cues; nevertheless, these are more consistent in LE and have a more disperse way in FE, adding to a greater difficulty at the systematic perception of prosodic boundaries in FE than in LE.

Is “limpa” a verb or an adjective?

We investigate the role of phonological phrase boundary cues on syntactic parsing by Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP) native adults. It is assumed that speech is organized in a hierarchy of prosodic constituents that may relate to constituents of other components of grammar (Nespor e Vogel, 1986). Although this is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship, a mapping is possible between constituents of each component, such as between phonological phrases and certain syntactic unit. The production of reliable prosodic cues in spontaneous speech is controversial. For instance, Snedeker e Trueswell (2003) propose that only expert speakers produce disambiguating prosodic cues; for Kraljic e Brennan (2005), even naïve speakers produce prosodic cues that are helpful for listeners. Millotte et al. (2007) found that French native speakers produced reliable prosodic cues (phrase-final lengthening and pitch rise) when they read pairs of ambiguous sentences that differed in their prosodic structures. The authors also found that native listeners were able to use these cues to assign the ambiguous words to their correct lexical categories. Then, -boundary cues may help native listeners to correctly analyze ambiguous sentences. Motivated by the French experiment results, we proposed two experiments in order to test the influence of prosody on syntactic analysis by BP adults. In the first experiment, a sentence-reading task, participants produced different prosodic patterns for ambiguous words (verb or adjective) in different syntactic structures. Duration, pitch and energy values of the segments around the-boundaries were measured and revealed that (i)-boundaries were marked by acoustical reliable cues; and (ii) the lexical categories N, V and ADJ have different behaviors in the prosodic structure. Figure A: Example of the Noun + ambiguous word - Adj [garota MUDA] (on the left) and V [garota] [MUDA…] (on the right).In the second experiment, listeners were asked to complete the auditory ambiguous sentences that were just cut after the target words (Eu acho que a menina LIMPA… . I think the clean girl…/the girl cleans…). Participants gave more verb responses in the Verb condition and more adjective responses in the Adjective condition. These results suggest that BP adults are able to use phonological phrase boundary cues to decide if an ambiguous word is a verb or an adjective and, then, to constrain syntactic analysis. We discuss the implication of these results for models of online syntactic analysis and language acquisition.Figure B: Experiment 2- Mean number of adjective and verb responses given to adjective and verb sentences (out of 4 possible responses for each sentence type).

음운구 경계와 단어빈도가 한국어 음운단어 재인에 미치는 영향*

This study investigated the interaction between phonological phrase boundary and word frequency variable in Korean speech processing. A word monitoring task was performed to examine the interference caused by the frequency effect of target word depending on whether a phonological phrase is formed within the target word. Frequency of target word (high vs low) and phonological phrase boundary (within target word vs between target words) were applied as between and within subject condition respectively. Our results showed the significant main effect of the phonological phrase boundary and the significant interaction. In the post-hoc analysis, the high-frequency target words were detected significantly faster than the low-frequency target words only in the within phonological phrase boundary condition. Frequency effect in the between phonological phrase boundary condition did not appear. The results indicated that the phonological phrase boundary and word frequency variable played an important role in Korean speech processing. In particular, we discussed the possibility of processing the word frequency at the very early sensory information processing stage based on the interaction of two experimental factors.

Prosodically Conditioned Consonant Duration in Djambarrpuyŋu.

Cross-linguistically, segments typically lengthen because of proximity to prosodic events such as intonational phrase or phonological phrase boundaries, a phrasal accent, or due to lexical stress. Australian Indigenous languages have been claimed to operate somewhat differently in terms of prosodically conditioned consonant lengthening and strengthening. Consonants have been found to lengthen after a vowel bearing a phrasal pitch accent. It is further claimed that this post-tonic position is a position of prosodic strength in Australian languages. In this study, we investigate the effects of proximity to a phrasal pitch accent and prosodic constituent boundaries on the duration of stop and nasal consonants in words of varying lengths in Djambarrpuyŋu, an Australian Indigenous language spoken in northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia. Our results suggest that the post-tonic consonant position does not condition longer consonant duration compared with other word-medial consonants, with one exception: Intervocalic post-tonic consonants in disyllabic words are significantly longer than word-medial consonants elsewhere. Therefore, it appears that polysyllabic shortening has a strong effect on segment duration in these data. Word-initial position did not condition longer consonant duration than word-medial position. Further, initial consonants in higher-level prosodic domains had shorter consonant duration compared with domain-medial word-initial consonants. By contrast, domain-final lengthening was observed in our data, with word-final nasals preceding a pause found to be significantly longer than all other consonants. Taken together, these findings for Djambarrpuyŋu suggest that, unlike other Australian languages, post-tonic lengthening is not a cue to prosodic prominence, whereas prosodic domain-initial and -final duration patterns of consonants are like those that have been observed in other languages of the world.

Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language.

It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languages can also mark lexically stressed syllables. Stress-induced lengthening can potentially be in conflict with right edge phonological phrase boundary lengthening. Thus the processing of durational cues in segmentation can be dependent on the listener's linguistic background, e.g., on the specific correlates and unmarked location of lexical stress in the native language of the listener. We tested this prediction and found that segmentation by both German and Basque speakers is facilitated when lengthening is aligned with the word final syllable and is not affected by lengthening on either the penultimate or the antepenultimate syllables. Lengthening of the word final syllable, however, does not help Italian and Spanish speakers to segment continuous speech, and lengthening of the antepenultimate syllable impedes their performance. We have also found a facilitatory effect of penultimate lengthening on segmentation by Italians. These results confirm our hypothesis that processing of lengthening cues is not universal, and interpretation of lengthening as a phonological phrase final boundary marker in a novel language of exposure can be overridden by the phonology of lexical stress in the native language of the listener.

Prosody and object clitic placement: A comparison of Old and Modern Spanish

It has often been claimed that the Tobler–Mussafia Law, i.e. the ban on sentence-initial clitic pronouns, is based on prosodic properties such as the ban on unstressed monosyllabic words at the sentence beginning (Mussafia, 1886) or the inherent enclitic nature of the respective pronouns (Meyer-Lübke, 1897). More recent research has identified a number of extra-phonological motivations for this clitic placement, making a prosodic explanation seem superfluous. The present study addresses the question whether Old Spanish, a clear Tobler–Mussafia language, differs in its prosodic patterns from Modern Spanish, which does not show the Tobler–Mussafia placement any longer. The comparison of the data shows that Old Spanish tolerates more sentence-initial unstressed monosyllables and unstressed pretonic syllables at the sentence beginning than Modern Spanish does, contrary to expectations. Together with the observation that the direction of clitic attachment is rather due to the prosodic context (i.e. the immediate preceding or following prosodic words and potential Phonological Phrase boundaries) than to a fixed directionality parameter, this falsifies the hypothesis that the clitic placement pattern in the TML language Old Spanish is due to specific prosodic patterns.

Aproximación preliminar al sintagma fonológico en español

Although the prosodic hierarchy has been well established in phonological theory for decades, little empirical work on its higher constituents has been done on Spanish. This study examines two well-known phonological processes in Spanish (spirantization of voiced plosives and fricative sibilant voicing in coda position) as possible parameters in the delimitation of phonological phrases. The data analyzed have been gathered from two native Spanish speakers from the Central Peninsular variety of Spanish, who read 334 stimuli created for that purpose. The results suggest that there is a phonological phrase boundary between the subject and the verb, especially in long subjects. Other syntactic structures seem to be mapped as prosodic constituents of lower or higher levels (prosodic words and intonational phrases, respectively).

Dividing lines: the Changing syntax and prosody of the mid‐line break in Medieval French octosyllabic verse

AbstractThe earliest French eight‐syllable verse texts show a regular line division after the fourth syllable. This mid‐line break becomes less common and disappears over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both a phonological phrase boundary and a stressed syllable are typically used to mark the division. Where the stressed syllable is not word‐final, authors choose to displace either the break or the stressed syllable from the mid‐line position, with preferences varying by author. The presence of any such tendency to regularize stressed syllable position is argued to show the continued saliency of linguistic stress in twelfth‐century French.

Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds.

Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences that contained this word, than to sentences that contained both syllables of this word separated by a phonological phrase boundary. We compare these results with similar results obtained with English-speaking infants, and discuss their implication for lexical and syntactic acquisition.

The Cognitive Processing of Prosodic Boundary and Its Related Brain Effect in Quatrain

Prosodic boundary, as an integral part of prosodic features in spoken language, is very important in sentence and discourse comprehension. Recently, researchers have shown increasing interest in the neural mechanism of prosodic boundary processing. Numerous studies have found that CPS, a special ERP component reflecting the closure of phonological phrase, could be induced by phonological phrase boundary embedded in a sentence. Also, researches have demonstrated that intonational phrase boundary in the end of a sentence consistently elicited P3, which reflects the operation of "syntactic closure" as well as the completeness of language unit. The present study aims to investigate the cognitive processing of intonational phrase boundary embedded in discourse and its related brain effect using ERP. To explore the processing of intonational phrase boundary in discourse, quatrain was used, which is composed of four sentences and five or seven characters in each sentence. Twenty (10 males) healthy undergraduates participated in the experiment. The participants were told to listen carefully to each poem, and complete a word discrimination task. Specifically, if the word "Space" was presented, they were asked to press the spacebar to continue. If other words were presented, they were required to press the "F" or "J" key to indicate whether the word appeared in the poem they had just heard. The EEG was recorded from 64 scalp channels using electrodes mounted in an elastic cap. Boundary-related ERPs were calculated for a 1500 ms epoch including a 200 ms pre-boundary syllable baseline. It was found that the three intonational phrase boundaries embedded in the quatrain elicited CPS respectively, with no differences in time course, amplitude and scalp distribution, indicating that prosodic boundary processing was not influenced by its position in discourse. Moreover, the final sentence of both five-character-quatrain and seven-character-quatrain evoked the P3 effect, with the amplitude elicited by the former one lower than that of the later one, but no differences in scalp distribution and onset latency. The present study suggests that boundaries conveying both the closure of preceding information and the prediction of upcoming information will induce CPS, while boundaries reflecting only the closure of preceding information will elicit P3. The nature and characteristics of these two components were also discussed in the present study.

Infants’ sensitivity to non-adjacent dependencies across phonological phrase boundaries

Natural languages contain numerous non-adjacent relationships between words or morphemes in a sentence, often straddling phonological phrase boundaries (e.g., [these sheep] [have [ellipsis (horizontal)]]). Since phonological phrases are considered the main processing unit for infants, this may cause the acquisition of cross-phrase dependencies to be challenging. This study, however, shows that by 17 months of age, French-learning infants have nonetheless gained sensitivity to remote determiner-auxiliary co-occurrences that are interceded by phonological phrase boundaries. Infants thus possess a robust mechanism for tracking non-adjacent dependencies. This ability is essential for early grammatical development.

Perception of Chinese poem and its electrophysiological effects

A neural correlate for phrase boundary perception in language has recently been identified as a reliable and replicable brain effect. It is called the closure positive shift (CPS) and has an equivalent in the perception of music (music CPS). Nevertheless, either in language or in music, this component is elicited by phrase boundary embedded in sentence or melody. Poetry, as the interlude of language and music, is a special kind of discourse and promising material to explore prosodic boundary processing beyond sentence level. The aim of the present study was to investigate the cognitive processing of hierarchical prosodic boundaries in Chinese Tang poem using rhythm matching task. There are generally four hierarchical levels in each poem, including foot boundary, phonological phrase boundary, intonational phrase boundary, and couplet boundary. The electrophysiological results indicated that all the prosodic boundaries of different levels in poems could give rise to the CPS reflecting prosodic phrasing. Furthermore, as the prosodic hierarchical level became higher, the onset latency of the CPS got longer, suggesting the influence of retrospective processing of former information. With regard to the amplitude, we analyzed the CPS amplitude in every 100 ms time window. It was showed that phonological phrase boundary elicited higher CPS amplitude as compared to that evoked by couplet boundary in an earlier time window, whereas in a later time window both of them were lower than the CPS correlated to intonational phrase boundary. The present results further shape our understanding of the CPS component and its relation to the processes involved in prosodic phrasing.

On the prosody and syntax of DPs: evidence from Italian noun adjective sequences

This study tests a syntactic property—namely the availability of N- vs. NP-raising in DPs—through prosodic means. The opposition between N- and NP-raising is central to the ongoing debate about the internal representation of DPs, yet it often eludes testing by syntactic means alone. As we show in this study, the two syntactic hypotheses are instead neatly distinguished by the distinct prosodic phrasing predicted by each operation. In this paper, we present the results of an empirical experiment designed to test the prosodic phrasing of N-A and A-N sequences in Italian and the corresponding syntactic implications. As prosodic cues, we use syllabic and word lengthening effects induced by phonological phrase boundaries. According to our results, A and N share the same phonological phrase in both orders. Regarding the syntactic implications of this finding, we show that under all current models of syntax-prosody mapping the underlying syntactic structure responsible for the attested prosodic phrasing must necessarily rely on N-raising. Finally, we propose an analysis of Italian DPs where the N-raising operation found necessary in light of the attested prosodic phrasing is reconciled with the evidence for DP-internal phrasal movement discussed in Cinque (2005 2006).

Perception of prosodic hierarchical boundaries in Mandarin Chinese sentences

The current study aimed at investigating the processing of prosodic hierarchical boundaries in Mandarin Chinese sentences using electroencephalography, mainly focused on the following questions: (1) whether prosodic boundaries at different levels could evoke the closure positive shift reflecting prosodic boundary perception; (2) what were the differences between them at latency, amplitude and topography; (3) whether this positive component was modified by the variations of acoustic cues (e.g. pause). Main results were: (1) As the previous studies indicated, intonational phrases elicited the closure positive shift as a marker of online speech structuring; (2) phonological phrases evoked the same positive effect with shorter onset latency and somewhat lower amplitude; (3) when the pauses in the vicinity of prosodic boundaries were entirely removed, the original latency difference between the two conditions disappeared, which clearly demonstrated the influence of pause on prosodic boundary processing; (4) prosodic word boundaries only induced amplitude variation waving around the baseline, which was more positive compared with the one elicited by syllable boundaries. The present results indicated that listeners were very sensitive to both intonational phrase boundaries and phonological phrase boundaries.

Bootstrapping Lexical and Syntactic Acquisition

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs. verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs. action). We speculate on how infants may build a partial syntactic structure by relying on both phonological phrase boundaries and function words, and present adult results that test the plausibility of this hypothesis. These results are tied together within a model of the architecture of the first stages of language processing, and their acquisition.

Phonological phrase boundaries constrain the online syntactic analysis of spoken sentences.

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.