Phonemic and Postural Effects on the Production of Prosody

Phonemic settings and the internal models that they represent are learned in the process of language and speech acquisition. Postural settings, in contrast, rely on continuous auditory monitoring and tend to break down quickly if this monitoring process is inhibited during speech production. Evidence presented in the literature seems to indicate that stable internal models are mostly associated with segmental phonemic targets, whereas prosodic features often display postural characteristics. In this paper it is argued that the dichotomy of phonemic and postural settings applies not only to segmental properties of speech but to prosodic features as well. Phonemic and postural effects on the production of prosody are reviewed and it is suggested that the boundary between phonemic and postural effects on a given prosodic feature is flexible. We further hypothesize that the speaker may rely on a set of acquired internal models and select from this set a particular model depending on communicative and situative constraints.