Perceived prosodic boundaries and their phonetic correlates

This paper addresses two main questions: (a) Can listeners assign values of perceived boundary strength to the juncture between any two words? (b) If so, what is the relationship between these values and various (combinations of) suprasegmental features. Three speakers read a set of twenty utterances of varying length and complexity. A panel of nineteen listeners assigned boundary strength values to each of the 175 word boundaries in the material. Then the correlation was established between the variable strength of the perceived boundaries and three prosodic variables: melodic discontinuity, declination reset and pause. The results show that speakers may differ in their strategies of prosodic boundary marking and listeners agree in the perceptual weight they attribute to the prosodic cues.