Abstract
Although prosodic features of speech are known to play an important role in the transmission of linguistic information, experiments are rather rare on the quantitative analysis for their roles in the speech perception process. As a step toward the clarification and formulation of the process, three perceptual experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, synthetic speech of isolated words were generated after accent type manipulation. Results showed that the prosodic features are important for word perception especially for the case of type 1 accent. The gating paradigm was applied to natural word utterances in the second experiment. Using the gated utterances as stimuli, the minimum period required for the correct identification was investigated for words with each accent type. Results showed that, utilizing the prosodic features, the perception of words with type 1 accent completes earlier than that of words with other accent types. In the last experiment, sentence stimuli were synthesized after manipulating phrase and accent components of the fundamental frequency contour. Results showed that a phrase component, even with a small command magnitude, can group words in a phrase unit, and, thus, can work as a cue for detecting syntactic structures.
