Phonological Phrase Boundaries Restrictions in Lexical Access by BP Adult Speakers

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 (ω) and phonological phrases (ɸ). 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.