The idea that words are grouped into larger, sound-based units is now mostly taken for granted by linguists and psycholinguists. However, motivations for assuming prosodic structure, theories of the structure’s form, and especially ideas about the function of this structure, remain surprisingly diverse across subfields. But not clearly irreconcilable. In this course we will review the empirical facts that have led different linguistic subfields to converge on the idea of prosodic groupings, with one overarching question in mind: can a prosodic unit be all these things simultaneously?

We will first consider the original work in segmental phonology that motivated the prosodic hierarchy, followed by the work on intonational phonology that emerged shortly after. Then, we will consider two areas of phonetics that provide similar evidence for the prosodic hierarchy: research on segmental realization and work on speech production planning. Finally, we will consider the view from the processing literature, where the phrase is also relevant, but in ways that present challenges for linguistic/phonological models of phrasing. 

(Time allowing, and participants interested and willing, the week may culminate in the design of a cross-linguistic study of speech production planning that (tries to) tie together phonetics, phonology, and typology.)

Some tentative readings

• Bishop, J. & Intlekofer, D. (2020). Lower working memory capacity is associated with shorter prosodic phrases: Implications for speech production planning. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 10, 191-195.
• Ferreira, F., & Karimi, H. (2015). Prosody, performance, and cognitive skill: Evidence from individual differences. In L. Frazier & E. Gibson (Eds.): Explicit and implicit prosody in sentence processing: Studies in honor of Janet Dean Fodor. (pp 119-152). Springer.
• Keating, P. (2006). Phonetic encoding of prosodic structure. In J. Harrington & M. Tabain: Speech production: Models, phonetic processes, and techniques. (pp. 167-186). New York and Hove: Psychology Press.
• Keating, P., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2002). A prosodic view of word form encoding for speech production. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 101, 112-156.
• Ladd, R. (1996). Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Especially chapter section 6.3 on ‘prosodic constituency’).
• Nespor, M., & Vogel, I. (1986). Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris Publications. (See also the 2007 edition published by De Gruyter Mouton).
• Watson D., Jacobs C., & Buxó-Lugo A. (2020). Prosody indexes both competence and performance. WIREs Cognitive Science,11(3), Article e1522.