Lecture silencieuse et oralisée des phrases relatives : le rôle de la prosodie
Christelle Dodane, Brunellière Angèle.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether prosody contribute to the integration of the syntactic level during the reading of relative sentences. A behavioural experiment was run on 20 French subjects. First, they had to read sentences silently presented visually (without prosodic markers such as commas). In an additional task using the same procedure, 10 subjects have to read sentences in a loud voice. The comparison between the two tasks reveals that words with the greater reading time in the first study correspond in the second study to a major prosodic phrase boundary. Results suggest that subjects have to restore prosodic contour in order to process syntactically relative sentences. The study of prosody in such a task provides a new methodology to access to the on-line syntactic processing.