The Processing of Sentence-Level Speech Prosody

Prosody plays an important role in spoken language perception. It assists not only in segmenting the individual words in the often continuous speech signal, but also in segmenting greater chunks of speech consisting of several words, such as phrases and sentences. We have explored two ways by which to investigate the processing of phrase- or sentence-level prosody, that is, first, by studying the processing of phrase boundaries and, second, by comparing normal speech with hummed sentences. Phrase boundaries are a global prosodic characteristic. Within sentences in German, for example, they are often prosodically…