Perceived prosodic boundaries in Taiwanese and Swedish
Journal
Meetings on Acoustics
Journal Volume
19
Date Issued
2013
Author(s)
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.
SDGs
Type
conference paper