Perception of sentence and paragraph boundaries in natural conversation

Abstract

Subjects were presented with two versions (with and without semantic information) of a natural conversation and in each condition were asked to respond when they heard a sentence or paragraph boundary. Presence of semantic information resulted in increased numbers of both very quick and very slow responses. Sentence boundaries are cued by non-level intonation contours, laryngealization, pre-boundary lengthening, and presence of a pause, all unit-terminal phenomena; cues for paragraph boundaries both precede and follow a change in topic, reflecting the optional nature of topic changes in natural conversations.