WH-questions generally lead to intonational prominence on words carrying the inquired information (i.e. words under focus) in the answer. Past German studies have demonstrated that Event-Related-Potentials (ERPs) are sensitive measures of listeners’ reaction to such focus-related prosody [1, 2]. According to [2], missing expected accents on focused words in short German dialogues lead to poster...

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of the relative importance of lexical stress, phra...

Northern dialects of the Mayan language Mam have a ternary weight scale for assigning stress, with added wrinkle that syllables glottal codas are heavier than those other coda types: VV > Vʔ VC V. This ranking is initially surprising under currently accepted prominence theory (Ryan 2019, 2020), where all equally moraic in contexts. However, phonetic experiment undertaken by Kuo & Elkins ...

If we categorize religions according to whether they give greater prominence to time or to space, the role of “promise” marks a religion of covenant as clearly a religion of time. Yet the future is unknowable and can only be present to us as a field of possibilities. How far do these possibilities extend? The question directs us back to the nature of time, a question that became concealed in th...

This dissertation examines the semantic underpinnings of argument realization. Much recent work in argument realization is based on some notion of “prominence preservation,” wherein the morphosyntactic prominence of an argument in the clause (e.g. its grammatical relation) supposedly reflects its prominence in the meaning of the clause. I explore prominence preservation as it applies to crossli...