Abstract:

The study is undertaken to look upon cognitive and prosodic aspects of speech segmentation in speech comprehension and production processes in reading. Here we provide empirical evidence that in sentence processing in reading speech segmentation functions at multiple levels of linguistic abstraction as shown by pause placement and distribution. The research comprises corpus-assisted discourse analysis and acoustic analysis. Speech chunking belongs to the lower short-term memory level, it can be realized without perceived pauses and is performed on smaller units. Information processing and decision making in pause placement and distribution are activated by contextualization cues and function at a higher level of working memory mechanisms, determining the communicative meaning of the utterance. They also facilitate complex sentence processing in regard to its communicative meaning. Pause placement and distribution implement patterns and/or tendencies that are specific to the particular context in which the utterance is produced.

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