ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993

Acoustic cues to syntactic structure - evidence from prosodic and segmental effects

Esther Grabe, Tara Hoist, Francis Nolan, Paul Warren

This paper presents an experimental study of the acoustic and perceptual correlates of syntactic structure in connected speech, conducted as part of a project investigating the use of prosodic and segmental processes in the real-time parsing of speech*. Evidence comes from auditory and acoustic analyses of assimilation and stress shift in speech production, and from an on-line comprehension experiment investigating the role of stress shift as a cohesion cue. Our results suggest that assimilation and stress shift processes are probabilistic rather than deterministic cues to structure.

Keywords: speech comprehension, cohesion cue, assimilation, stress shift, prosody