Constituents and heads in prosody perception: A comparative study

with Jennifer Cole (Northwest University), José Ignacio Hualde (University of Illinois), Caroline Smith (University of New Mexico), Tim Mahrt, and Christopher Eager

This project investigated the relation between prosodic phrases and their heads, and the perception of prominence and phrasing more broadly in English, Spanish, and French. For this series of studies we looked at spontaneous conversational data in each of the three languages.

Comparing the prosody of English, Spanish, and French is relevant because they differ in marked ways with respect to how prosody is structured, how it is manifested acoustically, and in its relation to meaning.