Listeners are Sensitive to the Relationship between Prosodic and Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Turkish

Turkish allows both canonical SOV and scrambled OVS word orders, and prior production work shows that these configurations are realized with systematically different prosodic contours. We asked whether listeners can recover word order from prosody alone. In two experiments, 22 native Turkish speakers heard low-pass filtered sentences (≤ 400 Hz), which removed segmental and morphological information while preserving overall pitch and amplitude contours. In Experiment 1, listeners classified thematically reversible sentences that crossed word order (SOV/OVS) with object case-marking (case-marked/non-casemarked object). Accuracy was high overall (81%) and was best for sentence types whose prosodic contours were most distinct (non-casemarked OVS, case-marked SOV), as confirmed by Bayesian ANOVAs. Experiment 2 added thematic reversibility (reversible/irreversible) and replicated robust above-chance classification (86%) and a subject-first bias (SOV > OVS), with case-marked sentences judged more quickly than non-marked ones. These results show that Turkish listeners are highly sensitive to the probabilistic mapping between prosodic and syntactic structure, and that prosodic information feeds the heuristics that guide comprehension in a flexible word order language.