ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1997

An experimental phonetic study of the interrelationship between prosodic phrase and syntactic structure

Cheol-jae Seong, Sanghun Kim

The boundaries found in the target 100 travelling domain dialogue sentences were labelled automatically according to the relative 9-stepped phonetic depth. The text database was also tagged with syntactic information. Having established 4 kinds of acoustic features, we arranged the prosodic aspect which can be depicted as a continuous change of duration and intonation across the penultimate, boundary, and post-boundary syllables along the X-Y two dimensional scale. Majority of the syntactic pairs seemed to have a characteristic that the intonation tends to fluctuate from rising to falling and, simultaneously, the duration showed of a short-long-short or a long-short-short pattern in the same syllable string of penultimate- boundary-post_boundary.