Auditory-perceptual acuity impacts prosodic boundary prediction in a gating task

Processing of prosodic phrasing requires listeners to integrate acoustic cues that unfold incrementally during speech comprehension, yet substantial individual differences exist in how listeners use unfolding prosodic information. This study investigated whether individual differences in auditory-perceptual discrimination abilities for prosodic boundary cues are related to processing of prosodic phrasing, and, more specifically, the ability to use the incremental bottom-up prosodic information for making top-down predictions about the syntactic structure of an unfolding utterance. Sixty German-speaking adults completed adaptive staircase procedures measuring Just-Noticeable-Difference thresholds for auditory-perceptual acuity in pitch, pause, and final lengthening discrimination. In addition, they performed a gating task that provided snippets of coordinate three-name sequences with or without an internal prosodic boundary in a randomized order. Performance in the gating task was analyzed using Bayesian multilevel Signal Detection Theory models to separate discriminability from response bias. Participants with higher auditory-perceptual acuity demonstrated better prediction of the upcoming structure across all gates. When all three auditory-perceptual acuity measures were modeled simultaneously, each individual effect attenuated substantially, indicating shared, rather than independent, predictive variance. These findings suggest that top-down prediction during speech comprehension is related to overall auditory-perceptual acuity rather than independent boundary-cue-specific sensitivities.