This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

This paper investigated the relationship of syntactic structure with prosodic and phonological information, focusing on distinctions between early and late closure sentences in terms both of intonational phrasing and of stress placement on stress shift items such as "Hong Kong." Contains 63 references. (MDM)