Transfer of sensorimotor adaptation reveals independent prosodic representation after segment-prosody coordination in speech production

In speech production, there is a long-standing debate regarding whether word-level prosodic structure has an independent representation separable from segments. Using a novel assay of sensorimotor adaptation, we observe straightforward evidence supporting an independent prosodic structure even after its coordination with the segments. Participants exposed to opposing formant perturbations applied to the two syllables of a single trained word (e.g., “bedhead” → “bidhad”) adapted separately to counteract the syllable-specific perturbations (i.e., producing “badhid”) and, critically, transferred the learned adaptation to untrained words based purely on shared prosodic structure (words with the same prosody but novel syllables, e.g., producing “breastfed” like “brastfid”). This evidence for an independent word-level prosodic representation, which has been hard to detect in previous studies, highlights the usefulness of sensorimotor adaptation as a tool for language production research.