Cues to upcoming Swedish prosodic boundaries: Subjective judgment studies and acoustic correlates

Studies of perceptually based predictions of upcoming prosodic boundaries in spontaneous Swedish speech, both by native speakers of Swedish and of native speakers of standard American English reveal marked similarity in judgments. We examined whether Swedish and American listeners were able to predict the occurrence and strength of upcoming boundaries in a series of web-based perceptive experiments. Utterance fragments (in both long and short versions) were selected from a corpus of spontaneous Swedish speech, which was first labeled for boundary presence and strength by expert labelers. These fragments were then presented to listeners, who were instructed to guess whether or not they were followed by a prosodic break, and if so, what the strength of the break was. Results revealed that both Swedish and American listening groups were indeed able to predict whether or not a boundary (of a particular strength) followed the fragment. This suggests that acoustic and prosodic, rather than lexico-grammatical and semantic information was being used by listeners as a primary cue. Acoustic and prosodic correlates of these judgments were then examined, with significant correlations found between judgments and the presence/absence of final creak and phrase-final f0 level and slope.