The aim of this paper is to investigate prosodic phrasing and more precisely the use of prosodic cues in the marking of morphosyntactic units in French. As a first step towards this goal, a perception study was conducted on 27 listeners, who had to perform 3 distinct perceptual tasks on 32 syntactically controlled phrases read by a female speaker: a prominence strength judgment task, a boundary strength judgment task, and a task where listeners had to choose between 4 different phrase groupings intended to reflect the potential choices of prosodic phrasing. The corpus consists of syntactically ambiguous structures manipulating high and low adjective attachment on 2 coordinated nouns. It was designed to specifically test the role of prominence and boundary cues in the marking of prosodic constituency. Our results show that listeners use prosodic cues to discriminate between the two syntactic structures, with boundary cues being more readily used to capture morphosyntactic structuring. More interestingly, our results indicate that prominence and boundary cues are used to distinguish finer-grained grouping levels than those predicted by traditional descriptions on French prosodic structure.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.