Perception of prosodic boundaries in spontaneous speech with and without silent pauses.

Abstract

Given the multiplicity of acoustic cues to prosody, Q1) Is the perception of prosodic boundary dependent on silent pause as an independent cue? Or Q2) Does redundancy in the acoustic encoding of prosody support robust prosody perception in the absence of silent pauses?

Using Rapid Prosody Transcription to probe little-known prosodic systems: The case of Papuan Malay

“…Turning to boundary judgments, we see that these basically conform to what has been found in RPT work on other languages (e.g., Mo & Cole, 2010;Smith, 2011, Smith & Edmunds, 2013Jyothi et al, 2014;Pintér et al, 2014). For both groups, there is moderate to substantial agreement in the familiar-language condition, and fair to moderate agreement in the unfamiliar-language condition.…”

Emerging word segmentation abilities in European Portuguese-learning infants: new evidence for the rhythmic unit and the edge factor

“…Furthermore, phrasal prominence tends to be located at utterance-final position in many languages (Nespor & Vogel, 2007). Utterance edges are also a probable location for pauses, which may be yet another prosodic cue for utterance boundaries (Cole, 2015;Mo & Cole, 2010). As utterance edges align with word edges, words at the edge of utterances provide stronger cues to word boundaries, and these may trigger an early emergence of word segmentation skills.…”

Spontaneous Speech Segmentation: Functional and Prosodic Aspects With Applications for Automatic Segmentation / A segmentação da fala espontânea: aspectos prosódicos, funcionais e aplicações para a tecnologia

“…2001;REDI;SHATTUCK-HUFNAGEL, 2001;HANSON et al, 2001;CARLSON et al, 2005). From them, the main boundary cues that emerge are: the silent pause, which we will simply call "pause" (later on we will discuss the role of the filled pause), whose presence automatically seems to convey the perception of a boundary (MARTIN, 1973;SWERTS, 1997;SHRIBERG et al 2000;CHANG 2008;MO;COLE 2010;TYLER, 2013); the lengthening of the final syllables of the unit, that is, a decreasing of speech rate during the last syllables before a boundary (WIGHTMAN et al, 1992;BARBOSA, 2008;MO et al, 2008;FUCHS et al, 2010;FON et al, 2011;TYLER, 2013); the shortening of the first syllables of the unit, that is, speech rate increases just after a boundary (AMIR et al 2004;TYLER, 2013), correlated with phenomena of anacrusis; the reset of the f0 curve; the abrupt change of direction of the f0 curve; the change of intensity at the beginning of the prosodic unit FU, 2005;MO, 2008); creaky voice and perhaps other non-modal voice qualities. To these parameters, at least for some languages, some phenomena of a segmental nature must be added.…”