Using Prosody to Predict the End of Sentences in English and French: Normal and Brain-damaged Subjects

Abstract In an earlier study (Grosjean, 1983), it was found that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word", that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. The present study investigated this phenomenon in four experiments. The first two experiments examined the prediction capabilities of listeners when presented with the whole sentence in segments of increasing duration and when presented with the potentially last word only. The results indicate that to be able to use prosody to predict the end of sentences correctly, subjects must have reached a point in thesentence where neither syntax nor semantics can contribute to the prediction process. The third experiment investigated whether the results obtained with English can be replicated in French, a language with a very different prosodic structure. It was found that unlike their English counterparts, French listeners were unableto differentiate between sentences thatcontinued, although theycouldtellifa sentence ended or not. Finally, the fourth experiment examined whether left and right hemisphere brain damaged(LHD, RHD) patients are equally proficient at estimating the length