Perceived prosodic boundaries in Taiwanese and Swedish

Abstract

Earlier studies have shown that listeners are not only able to detect the presence or the absence of a prosodic boundary but also able to distinguish between different boundary types. This study examined whether Taiwanese listeners (n = 18) and English listeners (n = 7) were able to predict the occurrence and the strength of the upcoming prosodic boundaries in Taiwanese and Swedish. For this purpose, we conducted a perceptual rating experiment, whose stimuli consisted of fragments with different boundaries (word, phonological phrase/tone sandhi domain, and intonational phrase), length (2-second and one-word) and quality (low-pass filtered and unfiltered.) Results show that both Taiwanese and English listeners can detect the occurrence and distinguish the boundaries in a foreign language when they are presented with longer fragments. Our finding strengthens the notion proposed in Carlson et al. (2005) that lexical information is not a necessary cue for prosodic boundary detection Another supporting evidence is that they could do the task nearly as well when the utterances were low-pass filtered. Significant correlations between ratings and the following relevant measures are found: f0 and voice quality.