Abstract

Four psycholinguistic experiments are reported, the aim of which was to examine whether and how the perceptual grouping of words into higher order units imposed by prosody can influence on-line sentence comprehension. The results suggest that prosodic phrasing does not directly influence syntactic decisions, but rather operates at the semantic interpretation level, in relation with lexical and discourse-level factors (e. g., verbs' argument structure and referential completedness of noun phrases).