OSFA cross-linguistic perspective on priming of prosodic boundaries
Published in Université Paris Cité, 2025
This work investigates the representation of prosodic structure and its role in sentence processing and production planning, adopting a psycholinguistic approach and a cross-linguistic perspective. Using different experimental paradigms, we aimed to address one general research question. Can intonational phrase structure (namely, boundary and phrasing) be primed? At what stage does it intervene in sentence processing and production planning? To explore this question, we used cross-modal priming paradigms in both production and perception studies, in English and French, to investigate how the prosodic structure (in terms of phrasing, boundary location, and internal modulation of durations) helps to guide sentence processing, the extent to which the prosodic structure representation is implicitly learned, and whether the effect persists enough to affect the production of overt prosody in new sentences (production studies), or the representation of implicit prosody in reading (perception study). First, we tested if and how far priming effects of intonational phrase boundaries found in perception in English generalize to production. Specifically, we looked at boundary location and the internal modulation of critical noun durations in the sentence. Next, we investigated the question of whether these priming effects of boundary location in production generalize to another language, French, characterized by a different way of organizing phrasing from English. Then, we tried to further disentangle the contribution of prosodic structure and syntactic structure in priming effects by trying to use the overt prosodic phrasing of delexicalized audios to prime the implicit prosody of target sentences, as estimated by reading measurements in an eye-tracking-while-reading task. We finally discuss implications for how prosodic information is represented, computed, and used in real-time in sentence processing.
Recommended citation: Bevivino, D. (2025). A cross-linguistic perspective on priming of prosodic boundaries. [Doctoral dissertation, Université Paris Cité]