Time course of Intonation Processing in European Portuguese: a Gating paradigm approach

EP listeners seem to pay attention to phonetic detail specificities of the speech signal, which allow them to start building their internal representation of the intonation contour very early in the sentence. Using the Gating Paradigm methodology (Grosjean 1980, 1996), 20 European Portuguese (EP) native speakers were presented with auditory speech stimuli gated in specific sentence locations, which they had to classify within a category and after it to rate their own answer confidence level. The influence and weight of lexical cues, especially whwords, for early sentence type recognition was considered. Results showed that the lexical cues power for sentence type processing is stronger than the prosodic ones. Sentences starting with wh-words, whatever semantic or syntactic function or prosodic information they have tend to be classified as questions. The interplay of all cues seems to occur later in the sentence, after more information becomes available.