This study is aimed at uncovering a way that participants in conversation predict end-of-utterance for spontaneous Japanese speech. In spontaneous everyday conversation, the participants must predict the ends of utterances of a speaker to perform smooth turn-taking without too much gap. We consider that they utilize not only syntactic factors but also prosodic factors for the end-of-utterance prediction because of the difficulty of prediction of a syntactic completion point in spontaneous Japanese. In previous studies, we found that prosodic features changed significantly in the final accentual phrase. However, it is not clear what prosodic features support the prediction. In this paper, we focused on dependency structure among bunsetsuphrases as the syntactic factor, and investigated the relation between the phrase-dependency and prosodic features. The results showed that the average fundamental frequency and the average intensity for accentual phrases did not decline until the modified phrase appeared. Next, to predict the end of utterance from the syntactic and prosodic features, we constructed a generalized linear mixed model. The model provided higher accuracy than using the prosodic features only. These suggest the possibility that prosodic changes and phrase-dependency relations inform the hearer that the utterance is approaching its end.

In this paper, the masked threshold of a sinusoidal signal in the presence of a notchednoise masker was measured experimentally for five normal-hearing subjects. The frequencies of sinusoidal signals used in the measurement were 125,

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This study is aimed at predicting the end of utterance by prosodic features and syntactic structure for spontaneous speech. In spontaneous everyday conversation, participants must predict the ends of utterances of a speaker to perform smooth turn-taking. We consider that they utilize not only syntactic factors but also prosodic factors for the end-of-utterance prediction because of the difficulty of prediction of a syntactic completion point in spontaneous Japanese speech. In previous studies, it was observed that prosodic factors changed such that the general fundamental frequency of utterance declined gradually toward the end of an utterance, and the intensity decreased significantly in the final accentual phrase. However, it is not clear what prosodic features support the prediction. We focused on dependency structure among bunsetsu-phrases as the syntactic factor and investigated the relation between the phrase-dependency and prosodic features based on a spontaneous Japanese conversation corpus. The results showed that the average fundamental frequency and the average intensity for accentual phrases did not decline until the modified phrase appeared. This suggests the possibility that prosodic changes and phrase-dependency relations inform the hearer that the utterance is approaching its end.