Perceived prosodic boundaries in Taiwanese and their acoustic correlates

摘要

This paper investigates boundary strength detection in Taiwanese and Swedish by Taiwanese listeners. Earlier production studies have suggested that the Taiwanese tone sandhi group (TSG) is an independent prosodic domain, yet no previous study has reported perceptual data to support this claim. This study presents listeners' perceptual rating data on different prosodic domain boundaries and demonstrates correlations between acoustic measures of the stimuli and the perception ratings. The perceptual rating results show that the Taiwanese tone sandhi group is distinct from other prosodic domains. Significant correlations are found between ratings and pitch, and between ratings and acoustic voice quality measures.