A cross-linguistic study on discourse and syntactic boundary cues in speech
Janice Fon, Keith Johnson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2001
Online segmentation is a formidable task for any speech parser. Yet, human beings seem to handle this task with ease. This study focuses on the relationship between discourse/syntactic boundaries and prosodic cues in divergent languages—English, Japanese, and two varieties of Mandarin (Guoyu and Putonghua). Speech was elicited by having talkers describe the events in a film [W. L. Chafe (unpublished)]. Recorded data were transcribed, digitized, and will be segmented into discourse and syntactic units while measurements of F0, syllable duration, and rms amplitude will be taken on the digitized data. Prosody will be partially labeled following ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) conventions of each language. A comparison of different dimensions of data-discourse/syntax, acoustics, and intonation, will be made in order to examine boundary cues in speech. Our previous work using a smaller set of Mandarin (Guoyu) data has shown that syllable onset interval isochrony is generally preserved until the pre-boundary syllable. Pre-boundary syllables are characterized by a significant lengthening effect, which differs by boundary types. Lengthening before discourse units is longer than that before syntactic units such as clauses or phrases. [Work supported by NIDCD.]