On the edge: acoustic cues to layered prosodic domains

Prosodic structure encodes the grouping of words into hierarchically layered prosodic constituents, in-cluding the prosodic word, intermediate phrase (ip) and intonational phrase (IP). This paper investigates the phonetic encoding of prosodic structure from a corpus of scripted broadcast news speech in Amer-ican English through analysis of the acoustic cor-relates of prosodic boundary and their interaction with phrasal stress (pitch-accent) at three levels of prosodic structure: Word, ip, and IP. Evidence for acoustic effects of prosodic boundary is shown in measures of duration local to the domain-final rime. These findings provide strong evidence for prosodic theory, showing acoustic correlates of a 3-way dis-tinction in boundary level