Does prosody support or direct sentence processing?

This paper addresses the question of the way in which prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. Two studies were run. The first, based on Beach (1991), dealt with people's judgements of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing prosodic contours. In the first, an effect of prosody was found over short but not over longer sentence fragments; in the second, some evidence was found of a prosodic effect in the judgement of normality. The behavioural data are related to acoustic analyses of the experimental materials. The implications of these studies for current sentence processing models are discussed.