Examining the role of pitch, duration, and intensity in word segmentation.

Abstract

English listeners can make use of stress cues in word segmentation. Stress is associated with a number of phonetic cues, including pitch movements, longer durations, and greater intensity. Studies on stress perception have shown that pitch is the most powerful cue to English stress, followed by increased duration and greater intensity [Fry (1958); Bolinger (1958)], suggesting that pitch alone might be sufficient to cue word boundary. Here, I test whether pitch alone is enough to cue word boundary for English listeners, using an artificial language paradigm. The artificial language used contains no distributional cues to word boundary, so words can only be segmented using pitch. I also pit pitch cues against intensity and durational cues in order to test whether English listeners weight cues for stress in a word segmentation task, or if they require correlates of stress to be bundled together.