This paper presents an experimental study of the acoustic and perceptual correlates of syntactic structure in connected speech, conducted as part of a project investigating the use of prosodic and segmental processes in the real-time parsing of speech*. Evidence comes from auditory and acoustic analyses of assimilation and stress shift in speech production, and from an on-line comprehension experiment investigating the role of stress shift as a cohesion cue. Our results suggest that assimilation and stress shift processes are probabilistic rather than deterministic cues to structure.
Keywords: speech comprehension, cohesion cue, assimilation, stress shift, prosody