Speech signals originate as a sequence of linguistic units selected by speakers,
but these units are necessarily realised in the suprasegmental dimensions of
time, frequency and amplitude. For this reason prosodic structure has been
viewed as a mandatory target of language processing by both speakers and
listeners. In apparent contradiction, however, prosody has also been argued to
be ancillary rather than core linguistic structure, making processing of prosodic
structure essentially optional. In the present tribute to one of the luminaries of
prosodic research for the past quarter century, we review evidence from studies
of the processing of lexical stress and focal accent which reconciles these views
and shows that both claims are, each in their own way, fully true.
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