Prosodic Phrasing and Comprehension

From previous research we know that prosodic features are perceptually effective in marking boundaries and that a suitable implementation of these features improves the quality of synthetic speech in terms of acceptability. It can further be assumed that listeners use the perceived prosodic information to compute the meaning of the input speech. This paper, therefore, investigates and determines whether a well-phrased utterance, (that is, an utterance with prosodic boundaries in appropriate positions and with appropriate realizations), is easier to comprehend than a poorly-phrased one. To measure this, we designed a method in which a kind of verification task is combined with a question-answering task (“monitoring for the answer”). The stimulus set consisted of structurally ambiguous sentences. The expectation was that when listeners hear a question followed by an appropriately phrased utterance, they will react more rapidly than when the question is followed by an utterance with neutral phrasing. Also, it was expected that in the latter situation reaction times (RTs) will be shorter than if an inappropriately phrased utterance is presented. The results confirmed the expectations: an appropriately phrased utterance always produced the fastest RTs.

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