A comparison of cue-weighting in the perception of prosodic phrase boundaries in English and Chinese

Prosodic phrasing plays an important role in language comprehension and processing. The present study investigates the acoustic correlates used in the production and perception of prosodic phrase boundaries. Specifically, it examines the perceptual weighting of these cues contributing to the marking of prosodic phrase boundaries differ in two languages, English and Chinese, with a focus on the difference in the perceptual reliance on pitch information by speakers of languages with and without lexical tone.;A production study examined the realization of pause duration, pre-boundary lengthening, and F0 change in syntactically ambiguous utterance pairs contrasting in the presence and absence of prosodic boundaries (e.g. coffee, cake vs. coffee cake) in English and Chinese. Results showed that speakers of both languages utilized durational (pause and pre-boundary lengthening) and pitch cues to signal phrase boundaries. Speakers of these languages differ, however, in the type of pitch information they employed for boundary categories: in English, F0 slope (representing dynamics of the pitch contour) was found to be an effective predictor; whereas in Chinese, pitch information was conveyed by a reset of the pitch declination.;A perception study investigated the relative weighting assigned by native English and Chinese speakers to these temporal and spectral properties in prosodic boundary perception. Responses to an identification task showed that both English and Chinese listeners use pause, pre-boundary lengthening, and pitch in perceiving prosodic boundaries in their native language. However, the two groups of listeners weight these cues differently, with English listeners attending more to pause than the other two cues, while Chinese listeners weight pitch reset most heavily.;These differences in perceptual weighting indicate an effect of language experience on the relative importance of perceptual cues. Language experience modulates the listener's attention to cues that are particularly relevant in the native language. Native speakers of a tone language attend to pitch information more than do native speakers of a non-tonal language because of the phonemic status of pitch in their native language.