The planning, production, and perception of prosodic structure

This dissertation examines aspects of phrase boundary production, perception and the structural properties of boundaries from a multifaceted experimental perspective. The term prosody refers to the accentual prominence and phrasal organization of speech, and the dissertation focuses on the later. An example of this aspect of phrasal organization is given below, where the two sentences differ in prosodic phrasing. a. She knew, Ann thought, about the present. b. She knew Ann thought about the present. In addition to intonational events, at their edges, prosodic phrase boundaries introduce systematic phonetic variation in the temporal properties of segments. Acoustic studies have shown that at boundaries segments increase in duration. Articulatory studies have shown that speech movements---gestures---become temporally longer in the vicinity of boundaries and that this articulatory lengthening increases with boundary strength. In this dissertation a series of experimental studies is presented examining (a) the articulation of gestures near phrase junctures, (b) the categoricity and gradiency in the production and in the perception of prosodic boundaries, (c) the link between articulatory properties of boundaries and listeners' perception of boundaries, and (d) the effect of prosodic structure on pause duration. Results from this research further our understanding of the linguistic representation of prosodic structure and its relation to processes involved in producing spoken language.