Individual Differences in Early Disambiguation of Prosodic Grouping

Prosodic cues help to disambiguate incoming information in spoken language perception. In structurally ambiguous coordinate utterances, such as three-name sequences, the intended grouping is marked by three prosodic cues: F0-range, final lengthening, and pause. To indicate that the first two names are grouped together, speakers typically weaken the durational and tonal cues on the first name whereas they are strengthened on the second name, compared with a structure without internal grouping. The current study uses a gating paradigm to test whether listeners can decide about the internal grouping of a coordinate structure by already exploiting prosodic information on the first name. One hundred ninety-two stimuli were cut into seven parts (gates) and presented to naive participants ( n = 45) successively (gate by gate) with increasing length of the utterance and amount of prosodic information. In a two-alternative forced-choice decision task, accuracy was above chance level after the second name. However, more than half of the participants could already reliably detect grouping patterns after the first name. These interindividual differences point toward the existence of different subgroups with diverging prosodic parsing strategies. Furthermore, listeners were sensitive to speaker-specific prosodic patterns. Depending on speaker-specific characteristics and individual parsing capacities, it seems possible—at least for a subgroup of listeners—to make predictions about the underlying grouping structure of coordinated name sequences based on early prosodic cues.