A cross-linguistic study on syntactic and discourse boundary cues in spontaneous speech

This study focuses on the prosodic and acoustic-phonetic cues at discourse and syntactic boundaries in divergent languages—English, Guoyu, Putonghua, and Japanese. Speech was elicited by having talkers describe the events in The Pear Story film. Recorded data were transcribed and segmented into discourse and syntactic units. Prosody was labeled following the conventions of Tones and Break Indices in each language. Acoustic-phonetic measurements of F₀, syllable duration, and syllable onset intervals (SOIs) were taken on the digitized data. A comparison of different dimensions of data—discourse/syntax, acoustics, and prosody, was made in order to examine boundary cues in speech.; Results showed that both language-universal and -specific cues exist. Prosodically, structural boundaries are indicated by intonation phrase (IP) boundary breaks in English and Japanese while in Guoyu and Putonghua, they can be indicated by a break level that is of a minor phrase boundary or higher. For all four languages, the proportions of IP breaks reflect structural hierarchy in a positive manner, although the degree of reflection changes with language.; Acoustic-phonetic cues show more cross-linguistic variations. Pitch reset is a prevalent cue for structural boundaries in all languages but English. For the three languages that show consistent pitch reset and declination across structural boundaries, the magnitude is reflective of structural hierarchy. Final lengthening of boundary syllables and SOIs is the most universal cue for signaling structural boundaries, and the degree of final SOI lengthening is reflective of disjuncture hierarchy. All four languages examined in this study showed similar patterning. However, there are also language-specific cues. In English, in addition to final lengthening, initial pitch-accented syllables and SOIs are also lengthened. In Guoyu and Putonghua, the scope of final syllable lengthening is widened to include the penultimate syllable. English and Putonghua are similar to each other in that there is no reflection of hierarchy in the degree of final syllable lengthening. On the other hand, Guoyu and Japanese are more alike in this regard since both languages show some reflection of hierarchy through the degree of boundary syllable lengthening. Bigger structural boundaries are signaled by a smaller degree of lengthening.