A dynamic view of the prosodic structure: the example of French

Abstract

The sentence prosodic structure is traditionally viewed globally in intonation phonology, taking into account all the prosodic events at once from the beginning to the end, without explicitly integrating the fact that these events occur one after the other in a time sequence. Indeed, whereas the speaker can achieve some planning ahead while reading a written text, it is barely the case for the listener, who has to process the sequence of syllabic units perceived one by one along the time scale. It is suggested here that prosodic events are used as acoustic signals triggering partial processing and storage of the already perceived syllables, followed by a concatenation of linguistic units (normally stress groups) already stored. This paper looks in some details into the mechanism of this decoding process, focusing on the role of prosodic events in the specific case of French.