20 Jan 2004

Alice Turk, Satsuki Nakai and Sari Kunnari (University of Oulu)

Current human speech recognition models such as TRACE and Merge successfully explain word recognition in connected speech through activation of, and competition between, lexical candidates when obvious prosodic cues to word boundaries are absent. Yet we know little about how and when prosodic cues to syntactic boundaries are processed, despite evidence from speech perception studies that such prosodic information /is/ harnessed by the listener in parsing speech.

We propose to utilize a Garner task to test the relative timing of prosodic (phrase boundary and prominence) vs. segmental phonemic processing. If the dependency relationship between the two processes is unidirectional (one process is dependent on the other, but the latter is independent of the former), this would suggest that the dependent process takes place after the other, independent process. For instance, the view that prosodic and detailed segmental processing occurs in a bottom-up fashion, as suggested by Pierrehumbert's Fast Phonological Processor, predicts segmental processing to be dependent on prosodic processing, but not /vice versa./

We compare the dependency relationship of the two processes in a non-quantity language (English) vs. two quantity languages (Finnish and Japanese). Finnish and Japanese, unlike English, have phonemically long vs. short contrasts and thus use duration as a primary source of information about the identity of these segments. We investigate whether differing degrees to which acoustic cues are shared by prosodic and segmental information lead to different patterns of prosodic-segmental processing interaction.

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