Syntactic Probability Influences Duration: Production of prosodic boundaries in clefted structures

Abstract

The strength of a prosodic boundary, implemented as the amount of phrase-final lengthening, is dependent on the probability of occurrence of upcoming syntactic structure. Prosodic boundaries in low-probability structures are stronger than similar boundaries in high-probability structures. The relevant probability is calculated ‘locally’, relative to the past several sentences to which a speaker has been exposed, rather than ‘globally’, relative to the speaker’s entire past experience with her language taken as a whole.

Documents:

Paper in Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (June, 2013)
Full manuscript (August, 2012)
Slides from the Workshop on explicit and implicit prosody in sentence processing (Amherst, May 2013)
Poster from the ASA/ICA meeting in Montreal (June, 2013)

    Near Boulder, CO, where the study was conducted.