An experiment was conducted to gain insight into the demarcative function of stress and intonation by testing the effectiveness of these features in resolving structural ambiguity. The responses of native speakers were analyzed both in the production and in the recognition of 68 pairs of potentially ambiguous sentences. Special care was taken to duplicate spontaneous language behavior by providing contextual clues for the identification of the constructions by the recording as well as by the listening informants. The statistical analysis of the performance of the speakers and the listeners showed varying degrees of positive correlation between syntactic type and prosodic feature pattern, depending on the syntactic constructions involved. A closer examination of the phonetic, grammatical, and semantic nature of the tasks which the informants faced as well as the differences between the performance of speakers and listeners in the several categories suggested that some prosodic features have a demarcative function inherently, while others only incidentally, the latter being the manifestations of rules whose domains coincide with certain syntactic boundaries. (Author/DO)