Perceived prosodic boundaries and their phonetic correlates

Abstract

This paper addresses two main questions: (a) Can listeners assign values of perceived boundary strength to the juncture between any two words? (b) If so, what is the relationship between these values and various (combinations of) suprasegmental features. Three speakers read a set of twenty utterances of varying length and complexity. A panel of nineteen listeners assigned boundary strength values to each of the 175 word boundaries in the material. Then the correlation was established between the variable strength of the perceived boundaries and three prosodic variables: melodic discontinuity, declination reset and pause. The results show that speakers may differ in their strategies of prosodic boundary marking and listeners agree in the perceptual weight they attribute to the prosodic cues.

Perception of prosodic boundaries by naïve listeners in three different types of subordinate syntactic constructions

“…In perception experiments, the point scales presented to listeners for boundary strength assignment vary in size depending on the theoretical principles about prosodic boundaries. Scales generally include four [25] or five [33] degrees although some studies have presented listeners with a larger point scale [11]. The influence of the Autosegmentalmetrical theory and its notation system ToBI (Tone and Break Indices [34]; [35]) leads to the adoption of a five-point scale based on ToBI's Break Index.…”

“…In this context as in spontaneous speech in general, variations in duration and silent pauses are the preferred cues to mark a boundary in discourse [7]; [8]; [9], as well as initial pitch upsteps [10]. Interlocutors supposedly use these cues to segment the flow of speech and to process information [11]; [12]; [13]. However, the data collected on the production of subordinate constructions do not document the relative weight of the vocal cues compared to the (lexicosyntactic) verbal cues in the interpretation of subordinate structures.…”

Can prosodic cues accurately identify constituent boundaries with cross-dialectal homophones? With as a particle in the Minnesota English Dialect

“…It is this fact that helps pave the way for the analysis of with in the Minnesota Dialect, as will be born out in subsequent sections. It has further been noted that listeners (and, consequently, speakers) are able to make use of the syntax-prosody relationship to accurately locate syntactic boundaries from prosodic information alone, regardless of lexical information provided (e.g, Collier and Hart, 1975;Collier, de Pijper and Sanderman, 1993;Sanderman, 1996). These studies successfully made use of prosody with no substantial lexical content included in the utterances (i.e, nonsense words).…”

A study on speech rate as a prosodic feature in spontaneous narrative

“…Variation in pitch range (BROWN; CURRIE; KENWORTHY, 1980;GROSZ, 1992;SILVERMAN, 1987;SWERTS 1997;among others), pausal duration (SWERTS; GELUYKENS, 1994;HIRCHBERG, 1993;COLLIER, PIYPER;SANDERMAN, 1993; among others), speech rate (LEHISTE, 1982; KOOPMANS-VAN BEINUM; VAN DONZEL, 1996;FON, 1999;SELTING, 1992), and amplitude (BROWN; CURRIE; KENWORTHY, 1980;GROSZ, 1992;HIRCHBERG, 1993) have all been studied, with some success, as potential correlates of discourse structure in speech.…”