Experimental evidence for recursion in prosody

The paper discusses two important issues in linguistic theory: the relation between recursion and linguistic structure, especially the status of prosody in the syntax-prosody interface, and how recursive structures can be related to those found in non-linguistic modalities. The paper reports on production and/ perception experiments to give evidence to the assumption that (a) speech prosody is recursive and (b) recursive prosodic structure is related to non-linguistic recursion. Based on earlier results (Hunyadi 2006) it shows that inherent grouping, the basis for recursion, is multimodal and is more extensive than previously found. It also shows that the perception of the violation of the principles of tonal embedding and tonal continuity are constrained by syntactic constituency.