A prosodic spine for speech production planning

Monday, 23 March 2009, Colloquium

Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel - Speech Communication Group, Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT

Abstract

There is growing evidence that prosodic structures specifying phrase-level intonation and prominence also govern the surface phonological and phonetic form of a spoken utterance. For example, recent studies have addressed the question of prosodic-constituent-final lengthening, its size and scope, and its variation with different levels of prosodic structure. This talk will review results from an acoustic investigation of final lengthening in Intonational Phrases which suggest the possibility of a discontinuous domain for boundary-related duration adjustment. These results will be discussed in a larger framework that relates to additional duration adjustment phenomena, and to the timing of possibly related phenomena such as speech-accompanying gestures of the hands and face.