Nakai, S. & Turk, A. (2011). Separability of prosodic phrase boundary and phonemic information. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129, 966 – 976.
Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Thomas
Phonemic and prosodic information sometimes share the acoustic cues employed, as well as the time domain in which the cues are present. Such shared employment of acoustic cue and temporal domain requires the listener to decode the acoustic cues and retrieve information from both sources. The present study hypothesized that when prosodic information was encoded by multiple suprasegmental cues, the retrieval of phonemic information would be enhanced. Three sets of two-choice speeded and gated classification experiments were conducted to investigate the interactions between processing information on prosodic phrase boundaries and the place of articulation of stops. Experiment 1 showed that processing of phoneme was less intervened when there were multiple cues (duration and F0) to prosodic organization in the signal. Since the stimuli in Experiment 1 were not strictly controlled, two additional experiments were done to closely examine the effect of duration and F0. Results of these two experiments showed that when both duration and F0 cues were in the signal, the processing of phonemic information was less intervened than when only one of duration or F0 cues was present. The results were taken as evidence that integration of multiple prosodic cues can result in the relative ease of retrieval of both prosodic and phonemic information.
