Figure 2.

Prosodic scaffolds. The notion of a prosodic scaffold refers to the melodorhythmic shell of a spoken utterance, as based on its prosodic features. Many declarative sentences have simple declining pitch profiles, as shown in musical notation on the top line for the phrase “The yellow telephone.” A lengthening of the utterance (middle line) produces a suspension of the declination found in the shorter phrase, as shown by the red box around “phone,” which is higher in pitch than “phone” in the first phrase. The same mechanism occurs again on the bottom line when the utterance is lengthened a second time. Here the suspension occurs on “rang” (red box), which is higher than “rang” in both preceding sentences. Data are taken from Chow and Brown (submitted), based on the relative-pitch productions of 19 native speakers of English. The relative pitch is shown on a treble clef for convenience of visualization. The absolute pitches are about an octave lower.