Exemplar-based production of prosody: evidence from segment and syllable durations

We present results from experiments on the temporal properties of prosodic events, providing evidence that accumulations of exemplars implicitly define perceptual target regions in prosody production. We argue that z-scores of segment and syllable durations are the relevant perceptual dimension of these regions. To support this hypothesis, we present experimental results confirming that realizations of segments and syllables in different prosodic contexts show significantly different z-score distributions. Further experiments show that the relationship between syllable z-scores and the z-scores of the corresponding segments is significantly stronger for infrequent than for frequent syllables. We claim that this is due to the fact that infrequent syllables have to be assembled from smaller units because they are not represented by enough exemplars to establish a syllable-level target region.