This study investigates the role of prosodic unit boundaries in on-line lexical access by Brazilian Portuguese adult speakers. Two types of prosodic constituents are considered: prosodic words (ƒÖ) and phonological phrases (.). Motivated by French experimental results, we proposed two experiments in order to examine on-line lexical access in auditory sentences, considering that prosodic unit boundaries could help the listener to identify morphological word boundaries more easily. In a word detection task, participants were requested to press a button as soon as they heard the target word previously shown on a computer screen. The results suggest that phonological phrase boundaries were relevant cues in the constraint of lexical access, inhibiting the activation of lexical competitors whereas prosodic word boundaries were not.
Index Terms: prosodic boundaries, on-line lexical access, Brazilian Portuguese.
Cite as: Alves, D., Name, C. (2010) Phonological phrase boundaries restrictions in lexical access by BP adult speakers. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 329
@inproceedings{alves10_speechprosody,
author={Daniel Alves and Cristina Name},
title={{Phonological phrase boundaries restrictions in lexical access by BP adult speakers}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 329}
}