Can linguistic boundaries change the effectiveness of silence as a phonetic cue?

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of three kinds of linguistic boundaries—word boundaries, prosodic breaks, and syntactic breaks—on the perception of a silent interval at the boundary site as a cue to the presence of a labial stop consonant. The experimental technique involved cross-splicing of portions of four naturally produced pairs of sentences, as well as presentation of excerpts from these sentences. Although one sentence pair showed a pronounced syntactic boundary effect, the other three (including two that were better controlled for semantic bias) did not, which points to a different, stimulus-specific origin of the effect obtained. Prosodic boundary effects were also generally absent, presumably because the stimuli were constructed such that prosodic variation ceased 78 ms prior to the critical silent interval. Only introduction of a word boundary effected a systematic reduction in stop consonant percepts, although this manipulation was confounded with other contextual factors. On the whole, the data provide little evidence for any direct effects of structural linguistic variables on phonetic segment perception; such effects seem to be restricted to the level of word recognition.