Cue-Weighting in the Perception of Prosodic Boundaries in Chinese and English
نویسنده
چکیده
Prosodic phrasing plays a very important role in language comprehension and processing. It divides the speech into meaningful chunks of information. While most linguists accept that prosodic boundaries are marked by a variety of acoustic cues that involve pitch change, pauses, and pre-boundary lengthening (Cooper et al., 1978; Crystal & House, 1988; Klatt, 1975; Lehiste, 1973; Scott, 1982; Streeter, 1978), there is no consensus, however, on the relative importance of these cues in perception. Moreover, it is not clear precisely whether boundaries are perceived differently in different languages. The present study intends to investigate whether the perceptual weighting of the prosodic cues contributing to the marking of prosodic boundaries differ across languages (English and Chinese).
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