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The present study investigated whether listeners use the prosodic variable, duration, to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences. Some of the sentences’ meanings could be represented by two distinct syntactic bracketings, e.g., ’’The hostess [[greeted] [the girl] [with a smile].’’ and ’’ The hostess [greeted] [[the girl] [with a smile.]].’’ Other sentences, while ambiguous, had a common syntactic bracketing, e.g., ’’[German teachers] visit Greensboro.’’ In this experiment the duration of words corresponding to ambiguous constituents of the sentences or containing ambiguous boundaries of the constituents was varied systematically. Subjects listened to the sentences and selected one of the two meanings. The results indicated that only sentences in which the two meanings were represented by two distinct syntactic bracketings were reliably disambiguated by durational cues. It is suggested that when the interstress interval spanning a major syntactic boundary is increased, listeners perceive the boundary’s presence. Subject Classification: [43]70.30, [43]70.70.

We discuss the design of a text-to-speech synthesizer, which accepts any type of English text as input, and creates an appropriate speech signal as output. Effective algorithms for converting text to sound must make use of intermediate data structures that systematically encode the degrees of freedom available to speakers of the language being synthesized. These data structures are an engineering approximation to what linguists call phonological representations; we will call them “P-structures.” Any TTS system must: (1) define its version of P-structures; (2) design and implement algorithms for transforming input text into P-structures; (3) design and implement algorithms for transforming P-structures into sound. Task ♯1 is mainly a problem in applied linguistics; task ♯2 can best be seen as applied AI; task ♯3 is an application of phonetics and signal processing expertise. Because of the interdependence of approximate solutions in different portions of the system, integration of the various parts is a non-trivial problem. We will analyze an example of a TTS system, showing how these problems were handled in building and combining its numerous pieces. Finally, we point out some areas where better solutions are needed, and suggest how to find such solutions.

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