PROSODIC PHRASING AND COMPREHENSION

From previous research we know that prosodic features are perceptually effective in marking boundaries and that a suitable implementation of these features improves the quality of synthetic speech in terms of a cceptability. It can further be assumed that listeners use the perceiv ed prosodic information to compute the meaning of the input speech. Th is paper, therefore, investigates and determines whether a well-phrase d utterance, (that is, an utterance with prosodic boundaries in approp riate positions and with appropriate realizations), is easier to compr ehend than a poorly-phrased one. To measure this, we designed a method in which a kind of verification task is combined with a question-answ ering task (''monitoring for the answer''). The stimulus set consisted of structurally ambiguous sentences. The expectation was that when li steners hear a question followed by an appropriately phrased utterance , they will react more rapidly than when the question is followed by a n utterance with neutral phrasing. Also, it was expected that in the l atter situation reaction times (RTs) will be shorter than if an inappr opriately phrased utterance is presented. The results confirmed the ex pectations: an appropriately phrased utterance always produced the fas test RTs.