15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Perceptually Based Prediction of Upcoming Prosodic Breaks in Spontaneous Swedish Speech Materials

Rolf Carlson (1), Marc Swerts (2)

(1) KTH, Sweden
(2) University of Tilburg, The Netherlands

The current paper reports on a study of perceptually based predictions of upcoming prosodic breaks in spontaneous Swedish speech materials. The question tackled here is to what extent listeners are able, on the basis of prosodic features, to predict the occurrence of upcoming boundaries, and if so, whether they are able to differentiate different degrees of boundary strength. To answer these questions, an experiment is conducted in which spontaneous utterance fragments (both long and short versions) are presented to listeners, who are instructed to guess whether or not the fragments are followed by a prosodic break, and if so, what the strength of the break is. Results reveal that listeners are indeed able to predict whether or not a boundary (of a particular strength) is following the fragment.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Carlson, Rolf / Swerts, Marc (2003): "Perceptually based prediction of upcoming prosodic breaks in spontaneous Swedish speech materials", In ICPhS-15, 507-510.