In comprehending speech, listeners are sensitive to the prosodic features that signal the phrasing and the discourse salience of words (prominence). Findings from two experiments on prosody perception show that acoustic and articulatory kinematic properties of speech correlate with native listeners’ perception of phrasing and prominence. Subjects in this study were 114 university‐age adults (74 UIUC + 40 Haskins), monolingual speakers of American English who were untrained in prosody transcription. Subjects listened to short recorded excerpts (about 20 s) from two corpora of spontaneous and read speech (Buckeye Corpus and Wisconsin Microbeam Database) and marked prominent words and the location of phrase boundaries on a transcript. Intertranscriber agreement rates across subsets of 17–40 subjects are significantly above chance based on Fleiss’ statistic, indicating that listeners’ perception of prosody is reliable, with higher agreement rates for boundary perception than for prominence. Prosody perception...
[1]
J. Perkell,et al.
Economy of effort in different speaking conditions. I. A preliminary study of intersubject differences and modeling issues.
,
2002,
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
[2]
Marc Swerts,et al.
Annotation of prominent words, prosodic boundaries and segmental lengthening by non-expert transcribers in the Spoken Dutch Corpus
,
2002,
LREC.
[3]
Dani Byrd,et al.
Articulatory Vowel Lengthening and Coordination at Phrasal Junctures
,
2000,
Phonetica.
[4]
Y. Mo.
Acoustic Correlates of Prosodic Prominence for Naïve Listeners of American English
,
2008
.