ON THE EDGE: ACOUSTIC CUES TO LAYERED PROSODIC DOMAINS

Tae-Jin Yoon, Jennifer Cole & Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ID 1264
[full paper]

Prosodic structure encodes grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, including the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech through analysis of the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundary and their interaction with phrasal stress (pitch-accent) at three levels of prosodic structure: Word, ip, and IP. Evidence for acoustic effects of prosodic boundary is shown in measures of duration local to the domain-final rhyme. These findings provide strong evidence for prosodic theory, showing acoustic correlates of a 3-way distinction in boundary level.