PROSODIC PREDICTORS OF DISCOURSE FINALITY IN SPONTANEOUS MONOLOGUES

This article reports on a study of the capacity of prosody to predict upcoming discourse boundaries. More specifically, it is investigated w hether the approaching end of a route description can be pre-signalled by melodic and temporal characteristics. Experiment 1 brings to light that listeners are able to estimate on the basis of such prosodic pro perties how far a given utterance is situated from the end of a descri ption. However, the scope of this prosodic prediction is relatively re stricted as listeners can only estimate the absolute discourse positio n of the last two utterances of the monologue analyzed. Experiment 2 i s run in order to explore systematically, by means of a test with synt hetic speech, to what extent melodic and durational properties are suf ficient to influence finality judgments.