Prosodic Structure

There is a general consensus today that, although utterances are produced, transmitted and perceived as a linear stream of (respectively) physiological, acoustic and perceptual events, see Fig. (6.1), they are mentally represented as a hierarchical prosodic structure, in which smaller chunks of speech are grouped into larger chunks following a hierarchy of phonological constituents, and that this prosodic structure is only partially related to the more abstract syntactic structure.