Production and Perception of Word Boundary Markers in German Speech

Word boundary markers in German speech were investigated with regard to production and perception. Seven of them were examined: glottal stops, allophonic variations of stops and /l/, silent intervals, distribution of stress, comparative vowel duration, contact geminates. In a production experiment, a speech corpus of read speech was created that contained targets with special word boundary areas as a result of splicing neighbouring words/word parts (ie. mag_er/mager, sah_T[om]/Saat). The production study revealed how frequently nonpredictable markers occured. Contact geminates were especially considered (ie. einem_Mann) which proved to be useful boundary signals. How important word boundary markers were for the recognition process, was demonstrated in a two-part perception experiment. Glottal stops and silent intervals >= 120 ms were found to be strongest.publishe