Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Two studies investigated the production and perception of speech chunks. A corpus study examined to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tested to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of prosodic breaks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, while listening to these utterances (N=51) or only reading them (N=40). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and frequent collocations. The perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of constituent structure on the identification of the prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks.