Boundary perception in fluent speech

Abstract: We describe a perceptual technique for locating boundaries in continuous reading, preliminary to an eventual definition of “boundary”. Nine subjects listened repeatedly to taped readings by five speakers of a 3549-word passage, marking copies of the text to show where they heard boundaries. Each listener had to invent and briefly describe a system of marks; no definition of “boundary” was provided. The marks were tabulated word-by-word as binary choices. Pairwise comparison of the listeners showed 82% agreement about the locations of the marks. This confirms the 81% three-way agreement we reported earlier in a pilot study, with three listeners and fewer text words. Other analyses compare inter-speaker consistency, sort the data by syntactic function at the lexical level, and describe the situation at the subject- verb boundary. Distribution of the data differs very strikingly from chance.