TY  - JOUR
A1  - Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia
A1  - Wellmann, Caroline
A1  - Petrone, Caterina
A1  - Truckenbrodt, Hubert
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Brain response to prosodic boundary cues depends on boundary position
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Prosodic information is crucial for spoken language comprehension and especially for syntactic parsing, because prosodic cues guide the hearer's syntactic analysis. The time course and mechanisms of this interplay of prosody and syntax are not yet well-understood. In particular, there is an ongoing debate whether local prosodic cues are taken into account automatically or whether they are processed in relation to the global prosodic context in which they appear. The present study explores whether the perception of a prosodic boundary is affected by its position within an utterance. In an event-related potential (PRP) study we tested if the brain response evoked by the prosodic boundary differs when the boundary occurs early in a list of three names connected by conjunctions (i.e., after the first name) as compared to later in the utterance (i.e., after the second name). A closure positive shift (CPS)-marking the processing of a prosodic phrase boundary-was elicited for stimuli with a late boundary, but not for stimuli with an early boundary. This result is further evidence for an immediate integration of prosodic information into the parsing of an utterance. In addition, it shows that the processing of prosodic boundary cues depends on the previously processed information from the preceding prosodic context.
KW  - prosodic boundaries
KW  - event-related potentials
KW  - closure positive shift
KW  - speech perception
KW  - prosody
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00421
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 4
IS  - 28
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Zerbian, Sabine
T1  - Prosodic marking of narrow focus across varieties of South African English
JF  - English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English
N2  - This paper reports on an elicited production study which investigates prosodic marking of narrow focus in modified noun phrases in varieties of South African English. The acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration in narrow focus is presented and discussed. The results suggest that these three acoustic parameters are manipulated differently in narrow focus in the varieties of English as a Second Language as compared to General South African English. The article compares the results to what is known about prosodic marking of information structure in other varieties of English as a Second Language and underlines the necessity of carefully controlled data in the investigation of phonological and phonetic variation in varieties of English.
KW  - South African English
KW  - Black South African English
KW  - English as a Second Language (ESL)
KW  - prosody
KW  - focus
KW  - fundamental frequency
KW  - intensity
KW  - duration
KW  - contact variety
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.34.1.02zer
SN  - 0172-8865
VL  - 34
IS  - 1
SP  - 26
EP  - 47
PB  - Benjamins
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -