Abstract
This study aims to quantify the effect of several information sources: acoustic, higher-level linguistic, and knowledge of the prosodic system of the language, on the perception of prosodic boundaries. An experiment with native and non-native participants investigating the identification of prosodic boundaries in Japanese was conducted. It revealed that non-native speakers as well as native speakers with access only to acoustic information can recognize boundaries better than chance level. However, knowledge of both the prosodic system and of higher-level information are required for a good boundary identification, each one having similar or higher importance than that of acoustic information.
Highlights
Prosody is an integral component of spoken language and the prosodic structure, by means of the edges of its different constituents—prosodic boundaries, has been shown to be used in various processes, from language acquisition in infants [e.g., word segmentation (Johnson et al, 2014)] to language processing in adults [e.g., sentence parsing, see Cutler et al (1997) for a review].Listeners have at their disposal various knowledge sources to postulate an upcoming prosodic boundary, including higher-level linguistic information, in the form of the lexical identity of the words, their meaning, or the word order used in the language as well as acoustic information, either language-independent or language-specific
We considered the academic sub-part of the corpus, and determined all inter-pausal units which ended with an intonation phrase (IP) boundary [equivalent to a level 3 break, according to the J-ToBI model (Venditti, 2005)], were preceded by an inter-pausal unit ending with an IP boundary, had no internal pauses and had only one internal prosodic boundary, which was an IP boundary
We have presented a study investigating the role of different information sources in the perception of prosodic boundaries
Summary
Prosody is an integral component of spoken language and the prosodic structure, by means of the edges of its different constituents—prosodic boundaries, has been shown to be used in various processes, from language acquisition in infants [e.g., word segmentation (Johnson et al, 2014)] to language processing in adults [e.g., sentence parsing, see Cutler et al (1997) for a review] Listeners have at their disposal various knowledge sources to postulate an upcoming prosodic boundary, including higher-level linguistic information (language-specific), in the form of the lexical identity of the words, their meaning, or the word order used in the language as well as acoustic information, either language-independent (the actual values of the acoustic cues, as present in the speech signal) or language-specific (knowledge of the prosodic system of the language, e.g., the importance/weight of each cue in the marking of prosodic boundaries). Automatic systems for prosodic boundary detection reach a high performance when lexical, semantic, or syntactic knowledge is used for classification (Sloan et al, 2019) or when these are added to an acoustic-only model (Ananthakrishnan and Narayanan, 2008)
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