TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of syntactic structure in guiding prosody perception with ordinary listeners and everyday speech
AU - Cole, Jennifer
AU - Mo, Yoonsook
AU - Baek, Soondo
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Jennifer Cole, Department of Linguistics, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 707 South Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: [email protected] This work is supported by NSF award IIS-0414117 to the first author and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson. For their varied contributions to the work presented here, we thank three anonymous reviewers, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Chilin Shih, Tae-Jin Yoon, Xiaodan Zhuang, and other members of the Prosody-ASR research group, and to José Ignacio Hualde. Special thanks to Zachary Hulstrom and Eun-Kyung Lee for their help with the prosody transcription experiments. Statements in this paper reflect the opinions and conclusions of the authors, and are not endorsed by the NSF or the University of Illinois.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - The relationship between syntactic and prosodic phrase structures is investigated in the production and perception of spontaneous speech. Three hypotheses are tested: (1) syntax influences prosody production; (2) listeners' perception of prosodic boundaries is sensitive to acoustic duration; and (3) syntax directly influences boundary perception, (partly) independent of the acoustic evidence for boundaries. Data are from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech, and the real-time prosodic transcription of those data by 97 untrained listeners. Inter-transcriber agreement codes boundary strength at word junctures, and Boundary scores are shown to be correlated with both the syntactic context and vowel duration of a word. Vowel duration is also correlated with syntactic context, but the effect of syntactic context on boundary perception is not fully explained by vowel duration. Regression analyses show that syntactic clause boundaries and vowel duration are the first and second strongest predictors of boundary perception in spontaneous speech.
AB - The relationship between syntactic and prosodic phrase structures is investigated in the production and perception of spontaneous speech. Three hypotheses are tested: (1) syntax influences prosody production; (2) listeners' perception of prosodic boundaries is sensitive to acoustic duration; and (3) syntax directly influences boundary perception, (partly) independent of the acoustic evidence for boundaries. Data are from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech, and the real-time prosodic transcription of those data by 97 untrained listeners. Inter-transcriber agreement codes boundary strength at word junctures, and Boundary scores are shown to be correlated with both the syntactic context and vowel duration of a word. Vowel duration is also correlated with syntactic context, but the effect of syntactic context on boundary perception is not fully explained by vowel duration. Regression analyses show that syntactic clause boundaries and vowel duration are the first and second strongest predictors of boundary perception in spontaneous speech.
KW - Prosody perception
KW - Prosody production
KW - Prosody transcription
KW - Spontaneous speech
KW - Syntax
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U2 - 10.1080/01690960903525507
DO - 10.1080/01690960903525507
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77957812935
SN - 0169-0965
VL - 25
SP - 1141
EP - 1177
JO - Language and Cognitive Processes
JF - Language and Cognitive Processes
IS - 7
ER -