Donʹt break, or do: prosodic boundary preferences

Four naturalness judgment experiments were conducted to test different hypotheses about prosodic phrasing. The hypothesis that syntactic constituents should not be broken into distinct prosodic phrases [as in Truckenbrodtʹs Wrap constraint (Truckenbrodt, H., 1995. Phonological Phrases: Their Relation to Syntax, Focus, and Prominence. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, MIT)] was less predictive of the results of Experiments 1 and 2 than the hypothesis that constituents may be freely divided into prosodic phrases, as long as the resulting phrases are semantically coherent [Selkirk, E., 1984. Phonology and Syntax: The Relation Between Sound and Structure. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA]. The results of two further experiments confirmed Watson and Gibsonʹs (Watson, D. G., Gibson, E., 2001. Linguistic structure and intonational phrasing. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Philadelphia, 15–17 March 2001) claim that prosodic breaks are natural before long upcoming constituents, but did not support their hypothesis that the distance between a new item and its integration site is what motivates the presence of a prosodic phrase boundary. The results are interpreted as further evidence that the use of high level breaks in language comprehension is not governed by an invariant local mapping from syntax or processing considerations to prosody/intonation, but is related to the overall pattern of intonational choices made.