ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2023

Tonal coarticulation as a cue for upcoming prosodic boundary

Jianjing Kuang, May Pik Yu Chan, Nari Rhee

It has been established that the lack of tonal coarticulation or pitch reset is a salient cue for the beginning of a large prosodic domain, however, it is yet unclear whether tonal coarticulation can be an informative cue for the end of a prosodic domain. We examined this question with two continuous speech corpora of Mandarin, and both expert and crowd-sourced perceptual annotations were used. The FPCA model of the holistic tonal contours shows that the carry-over effect of the preceding tone is significantly affected by the strength of the following boundaries. Stronger carry-over effects are associated with the end of larger prosodic boundaries. Moreover, machine learning classification shows that the fine-grained tonal coarticulation patterns are salient cues for predicting larger prosodic boundaries. This result is further validated by crowd-sourced boundary perceptual ratings from human listeners. This study has important implications for the understanding of prosodic phrasing.