Prominent words as anchors for TRP projection

The effect of the position of the last accented word on the projection of TRPs was investigated with two RT experiments. Subjects were asked to respond with minimal responses to prerecorded dialogs and impoverished versions of these dialogs, containing either only intonation and pause information,hummed stimuli, or no periodic component at all, whispered stimuli. The distribution of these elicited response delays was comparable to that of natural turn switches. It is shown that the presence of non-prominent words before a TRP reduces the delays of elicited and natural responses alike, even in impoverished speech. This suggests that the presence of an prominent, informative, word starts the projection of a possible upcoming TRP. The availability of non-prominent, predictable, speech then allows listeners to improve their predictions of the exact timing of the TRP.