Abstract:

Prosodic boundaries act to locally slow speech, resulting in lengthenedarticulatory and acoustic durations. The amount of lengthening has been shownto differ based on the juncture strength; however, previous studies disagreeon the quantitative characteristics of and qualitative number of prosodicboundaries. Piecewise durational analyzes of articulatory trajectories giveonly one view of the nature and types of phrasal junctures. Recent work hasproposed an alternative to this approach, based on functional data analysis(FDA). [Lee , J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (2006).] FDA offers a route to movebeyond examining piecewise intervals in the articulatory kinematics, suchas constriction duration, to examining the entire time course of a kinematictrajectory to derive a time warping function that characterizes the localnonlinear deformations of articulatory trajectories as a boundary is approachedand as it recedes. The use of FDA, and particularly of the deformation index—ameasure of local time warping developed by our team—has been shown todistinguish boundaries of different strengths in speech generated using articulatorysynthesis [Parrell , Speech Prosody (2010).] In the current study,we extend this technique to nonsynthetic articulatory data, using the deformationindex to distinguish and quantify different types of prosodic boundary. [Worksupported by NIH].