MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences UnitCBSU bibliography search
To request a reprint of a CBSU publication, please
click here to send us an email (reprints may not be available for all publications)
Syllabic lengthening as a word boundary cue.
Authors:
Cutler, A. & Butterfield, S.
Reference:
In R. Seidl (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 324-328), (Melbourne, November 1990). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.
Year of publication:
1990
CBU number:
2528
Abstract:
A study is reported testing listeners' sensitivity to low levels of durational variation as a word boundary cue. Twenty-four ambiguous bisyllabic strings, each of which could be one or two words (e.g. lettuce/let us, inquires/in choirs) were recorded in sentence contexts, digitised and the duration of each critical syllable measured on the digitised waveform. In final-stress items both syllables were lengthened in the two-word version compared to the one-word, but in initial-stress items boundary-conditioned lengthening was very slight, and confined to the first syllable. The ambiguous bisyllables were then excised from the sentence context and presented in isolation to listeners, who were asked to judge which context they had come from. The listeners showed a general preference for making one-word choices, but made significantly more two-word choices to two-word productions. The proportion of two-word choices correlated positively with measured duration, but only for final-stress items (e.g. inquires/in choirs).
