**Get in touch!**
(1) In the comments here from 12:10 -2:00 EDT, Friday March 20th -
(2) Over email at jsteffman@g.ucla.edu anytime
(3) Or, over Zoom during the poster session at: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/592653717
Meeting ID: 592 653 717
**Abstract**
The present study tests how listeners make use of prosodic structure in the
perception of segmental (lexical level) contrasts in spoken language.
Though segmental and prosodic processing are typically conceived of as
fairly independent, acoustic structure in the speech signal is shaped by
both prosody and segment. Listeners are accordingly hypothesized to make
use of prosodic factors when determining segmental categories in speech.
The present study addresses how phrase-level prominence (previously
untested) mediates listeners' perception of vowel contrasts. Experiment 1
finds prominence affects listeners' perception offline. Experiment 2 tests
the time-course of prosodic effects, showing they are delayed in their
influence relative to vowel-internal acoustic cues. This timing pattern
favors a recent proposal in the literature - that prosody is integrated
with segmental structure via lexical competition (Mitterer et al. 2019);
i.e. that segmental cues activate lexical hypotheses and prosodic
structure subsequently modulates activation.
