Perceived prosody: Phonetic bases of prominence and boundaries

In comprehending speech, listeners are sensitive to the prosodic features that signal the phrasing and the discourse salience of words (prominence). Findings from two experiments on prosody perception show that acoustic and articulatory kinematic properties of speech correlate with native listeners’ perception of phrasing and prominence. Subjects in this study were 114 university-age adults (74 UIUC + 40 Haskins), monolingual speakers of American English who were untrained in prosody transcription. Subjects listened to short recorded excerpts (about 20 s) from two corpora of spontaneous and read speech (Buckeye Corpus and Wisconsin Microbeam Database) and marked prominent words and the location of phrase boundaries on a transcript. Intertranscriber agreement rates across subsets of 17–40 subjects are significantly above chance based on Fleiss’ statistic, indicating that listeners’ perception of prosody is reliable, with higher agreement rates for boundary perception than for prominence. Prosody perception varies across listeners (both corpora) and across speakers (WMD, where perceived prosody varies for the same utterance produced by different speakers). Acoustic measures from stressed vowels (Buckeye: duration, intensity, F1, F2) and articulatory kinematic measures (WMD) are correlated with the perceived prosodic features of the word. [Work supported by NSF.]