Prosodic cues to the perception of constituent boundaries

This article is concerned with the relationship between the strength of prosodic boundaries in spoken utterances as perceived by untrained listeners and the phonetic cues melodic discontinuity, pause and declination reset. It is shown that boundary strength can be approached and measured as a perceptual variable in its own right. Clear relationships are found between perceptual boundary strength and both phonetic events and predicted prosodic boundary levels