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Prosodic Structure and Word Recognition

  • Chapter
Language Comprehension: A Biological Perspective

Abstract

Prosodic structure is a dimension which belongs to spoken language. Although a good writer may aim for, say, rhythmic effects in prose, these rely upon the reader’s ability to ‘hear’ them ‘in the mind’s ear’, i.e. mentally to convert the written prose to a spoken form. As this chapter will outline, listeners make extensive and varied use of prosodic information in recognizing spoken utterances. However, because prosody is a property of spoken language, and because there has (purely for reasons of empirical tractability) been much less psycholinguistic research on spoken than on written language, the study of prosody’s role in recognition is relatively underdeveloped. A recent comprehensive literature review in this area, covering the role of prosody in the comprehension of syntactic and discourse structure as well as in the recognition of spoken words (Cutler, Dahan & van Donselaar, 1997), lists some three hundred references, but this is a tiny amount compared with, for instance, the literature on visual word recognition, even that based on just one laboratory task (lexical decision). Moreover, as Cutler et al. conclude, the literature is very unbalanced: some topics have been repeatedly examined, in studies differing only in minor details, while other topics have been ignored completely. This is also true of research in different languages; as in all areas of psycholinguistics, most research has been conducted in English, but among other languages some have received considerable research attention, some none at all. Particularly relevant here is the comarison between German and Dutch: the prosodic structure of these two languages is very similar, and has been comprehensively described for both languages in the phonetic literature, but although the psycholinguistic literature now contains a quite substantial number of experimental studies of the processing of Dutch prosody, there have been remarkably few comparable studies in German.

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Cutler, A. (1999). Prosodic Structure and Word Recognition. In: Language Comprehension: A Biological Perspective. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-59967-5_2

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