ACOUSTIC CUES OF PROSODIC BOUNDARIES IN GERMAN AT DIFFERENT SPEECH RATE

International audienceThis paper reports results of a production study on prosodic phrase boundaries at different speech rates. Our research question was to examine which acoustic cues (F0, intensity and duration) change as a function of speech rate both before and after prosodic phrase boundaries. We investigated identical sentences that differed in the placement of the prosodic boundary, i.e. before or after the critical word. Based on the data of 25 German speakers, duration was the main acoustic cue that speakers altered when marking prosodic boundaries at different speech rates. More specifically, words which appear before the boundary had longer durations, similarly to pauses at phrase-final boundaries, even if the speech rate increases. Intensity does also play a role: in faster speech words are produced with a higher intensity. Finally, F0 max was not changed on the critical words but rather it altered in comparison to F max of the preceding word