ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

Experimental Study on the Role of Prosodic Features in the Human Process of Spoken Word Perception

Keikichi Hirose, Nobuaki Minematsu, Mika Ito

Department of Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

As a step toward the clarification and formulation of the human process of speech perception through prosodic features, perceptual experiments were conducted on the transmission of accent types as well as on the transmission of word meaning using synthetic speech of Japanese words of four morae. As for the transmission of word meaning, the role of prosodic features for word identification was found to be largest for type 1 accent. This is because the type 1 accent has a falling in the fundamental frequency contour at the beginning portion of the word and, therefore, the prosodic features can be utilized before the perception of whole segmental features. As for the transmission of accent types, several results were obtained implying the existence of the process for accent-type identification aside from the process for perceiving segmental features.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hirose, Keikichi / Minematsu, Nobuaki / Ito, Mika (1993): "Experimental study on the role of prosodic features in the human process of spoken word perception", In Prosody-1993, 200-203.