Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries

Wightman, Colin W.; Shattuck‐Hufnagel, Stefanie; Ostendorf, Mari; Price, Patti

doi:10.1121/1.402450

Cited by 754 publications

(498 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…We used sequence duration as an index of the presence and/or strength of a prosodic boundary, based on the well-established effect of prosodic boundaries on preboundary segment duration (e.g. Beckman & Edwards, 1990;Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2000;Wightman et al, 1992). However, this in itself does not demonstrate that sequence duration is the dimension over which the computations leading to differential lexical activation take place.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980; but see Pierrehumbert & Liberman, 1982;Shattuck-Hufnagel & Turk, 1996, and references therein, for discussions on the mapping between syntax and prosody). Ladd and Campbell (1991) and Wightman, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Ostendorf, and Price (1992), amongst others, have shown that the amount of preboundary lengthening varies with the level of the prosodic boundary. Segmental lengthening is stronger at the edge of high prosodic domains, such as intermediate and intonational phrases, than at the edge of lower prosodic domains, such as prosodic words and accentual phrases.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension

2003

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Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process. q

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension

2003

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“…As preboundary lengthening has widely been considered as one of the primary phonetic correlates of prosodic structure (e.g., Wightman et al, 1992), we first examined whether our threeway prosodic grouping (based on pause and boundary tones; see Section 2.2) could be corroborated by differences among the three prosodic groups (BG, SM and WD) in the duration of the preboundary syllables. There was a significant Boundary effect on preboundary syllable (CV#) duration (F [1.4, 14.5] ¼ 90.42, po0:0001).…”

Section: Preboundary Lengtheningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic influences on consonant production in Dutch: Effects of prosodic boundaries, phrasal accent and lexical stress

Cho

McQueen

2005

Journal of Phonetics

135

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Prosodic influences on phonetic realizations of four Dutch consonants (/t d s z/) were examined. Sentences were constructed containing these consonants in word-initial position; the factors lexical stress, phrasal accent and prosodic boundary were manipulated between sentences. Eleven Dutch speakers read these sentences aloud. The patterns found in acoustic measurements of these utterances (e.g., voice onset time (VOT), consonant duration, voicing during closure, spectral center of gravity, burst energy) indicate that the low-level phonetic implementation of all four consonants is modulated by prosodic structure. Boundary effects on domain-initial segments were observed in stressed and unstressed syllables, extending previous findings which have been on stressed syllables alone. Three aspects of the data are highlighted. First, shorter VOTs were found for /t/ in prosodically stronger locations (stressed, accented and domaininitial), as opposed to longer VOTs in these positions in English. This suggests that prosodically driven phonetic realization is bounded by language-specific constraints on how phonetic features are specified with phonetic content: Shortened VOT in Dutch reflects enhancement of the phonetic feature {Àspread glottis}, while lengthened VOT in English reflects enhancement of {+spread glottis}. Prosodic strengthening therefore appears to operate primarily at the phonetic level, such that prosodically driven enhancement of phonological contrast is determined by phonetic implementation of these (language-specific) phonetic features. Second, an accent effect was observed in stressed and unstressed syllables, and was independent of prosodic boundary size. The domain of accentuation in Dutch is thus larger than the foot. prosodic category consisting of those utterances with a boundary tone but no pause, tokens with syntactically defined Phonological Phrase boundaries could be differentiated from the other tokens. This syntactic influence on prosodic phrasing implies the existence of an intermediate-level phrase in the prosodic hierarchy of Dutch. r

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“…Primarily, speakers mark boundaries with increased duration of pre-boundary words (Price, et al, 1991;Wightman, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Ostendorf, & Price, 1992;Ferreira, 1993;Lehiste, Olive & Streeter, 1976;Selkirk, 1984;Schafer, et al, 2000;Snedeker & Trueswell, 2003) and / or silence (Lehiste, 1973;Klatt, 1975;Cooper & Paccia-Copper, 1980). In addition, speakers often raise or lower their pitch at the end of intonational phrases (Streeter, 1978;Pierrehumbert, 1980).…”

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confidence: 99%

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

Breen

Watson

Gibson

2011

Language and Cognitive Processes

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This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson & Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries at evenly spaced intervals. In order to evaluate these proposals, we elicited naïve speakers' productions of sentences systematically varying in the length of three post-verbal constituents: a direct object, an indirect object (a prepositional phrase), and a verb phrase modifier, as in the sentence, The teacher assigned the chapter (on local history) to the students (of social science) yesterday / before the first midterm exam.

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Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries

Cited by 754 publications

References 15 publications

The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension

The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension

Prosodic influences on consonant production in Dutch: Effects of prosodic boundaries, phrasal accent and lexical stress

Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance

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