Empirical evidence for prosodic phrasing: pauses as linguistic annotation in Korean read speech

This paper looks at the relationship between acoustic cues and judgments of prosodic boundaries. It is argued that in read speech, the presence of a silent pause can generally be taken as an indication of the presence of a prosodic boundary although in spontaneous speech the presence of a silent pause is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a prosodic boundary. Two experiments are described concerning Korean read speech. In the first, subjects were asked to say whether extracts of speech (filtered to make them unintelligible) were taken from the same or from two different sentences. The results confirmed that in the majority of cases the listeners do not rely on the presence of a silent pause since even when the pause has been removed the boundary is correctly predicted almost as well as when it has not been removed. In the second experiment a number of acoustic cues, temporal and frequential, were used to predict the distribution of pauses without reference to the silence itself.