Temporal cues support syntactic identification

The roles of temporal and spectral cues in syntactic processing are examined. Fifteen normal hearing, native English-speaking females and 5 listeners participated. Listeners correctly identified most common syntactic structures when spectral cues were severely reduced but prosodic cues were largely preserved, or when normal sentence-level prosodic cues were altered but spectral cues were preserved. Error patterns in the spectral inversion condition suggests that listeners are guided by syllabicity cues. A high working memory span to accuracy correlation in identifying the sentence types supports the idea that subjects are storing information about the number and relative timing of syllables and using this information to select an alternative sentence.