| Popis: |
This study investigates the impact of prosodic boundary phenomena and syntactic clause boundaries on native and non-native speech chunking. German and Esto nian listeners were asked to listen to spontaneous utterances spoken in Estonian and to mark in corresponding written transcripts when they perceived any sort of a break between the words. Estonian listeners were the strongest guided by the clause boundaries whereas German listeners were sensitive to all of the prosodic boundary phenomena but resistant to the presence of clause boundaries. In particular, both German and Estonian listeners utilized longer pauses and rising F0 contour as cues for chunk boundaries. German listeners additionally employed phrase-final lengthening and intensity drop. These results suggest strong bottom-up effects in non-native speech processing, and both bottom-up effects and top-down effects in native processing of speech. Thus, the well-known prosodic boundary phenomena trigger bottom-up processing in on-going spontaneous speech comprehension. |
