Intonation and intelligibility of time-compressed speech. Supplementary report: English vs. French.

Comparative data are reported for the intelligibility of English and of French time-compressed speech when heard spoken either in normal intonation or in intonation patterns conflicting with underlying syntactic structure. Within an overall decrement in intelligibility with increasing compression, both French and English show similar superiority functions for sentences heard in normal intonation. Results suggest a role of prosodic features in perceptual processing of French comparable to that previously reported for English.