Heavy constituent extraposition : evidence for parallel processing

Abstract

Dominant models of speech production have employed linguistic components with a high degree of functional specialization, positing that phonological processing occurs only after semantic and syntactic processing has been completed. It has also been claimed, however, that processing at the phonological level can affect syntactic structure. The experimental results presented here show effects on Dutch syntactic structure that appear to be related to separate factors of definiteness and prosodic weight.