Prosodic planning in speech production

Theories of language production need to account for how speakers produce prosodic structure. Very few models have addressed the role of prosodic phrasing in speech planning, and little experimental work examining this question has been conducted so far. Four studies designed to investigate the effect of phrase length and prosodic phrasing on speech planning are presented. The first experiment examines the effect of prosodic structural complexity on pause duration using very long phrases (28 syllables). In a second experiment the effect of prosodic structural complexity using phrases of different length (6, 10, 14 syllables) is investigated. Experiment 3 examines the effect of prosodic complexity when the utterances are strings of numbers and Experiment 4 examines local and distant effects of prosodic phrase length on pause duration. The results show that speakers have a large scope of planning and that both local and distant prosodic phrases have an effect on the speech planning process. It is argued that prosodic structure determines the chunk to be planned by speakers. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.