We tested whether adult listeners can simultaneously keep track of variations in pitch and syllable duration in order to segment continuous speech into phrases and group these phrases into sentences. The speech stream was constructed so that prosodic cues signaled hierarchical structures (i.e., phrases embedded within sentences) and non-adjacent…

We used eyetracking to examine how tonal versus segmental information influence spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese. Participants heard an auditory word and were required to identify its corresponding picture from an array that included the target item ("chuang2" "bed"), a phonological competitor (segmental: chuang1 "window"; cohort:…