Prosodic boundaries in speech: A window to spoken language comprehension

doi:10.3724/SP.J.1042.2021.00425

Abstract

Abstract:

The perception of prosodic boundaries is critical to spoken language comprehension, and it has become a primary research topic among psychologists and psycholinguists in the past decade. Utterances are chunked into prosodic units of different strengths. The boundaries between prosodic units are mainly signaled by acoustic cues like pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Previous cognitive, linguistic, developmental, and neuroimaging studies have significantly advanced our understanding of the processing of prosodic boundaries. We now know that listeners use a perceptual weighting strategy to process prosodic boundary cues, and there are specific brain mechanisms for prosodic boundary processing. The ability to processing prosodic boundaries steadily develops with age in young children and transfers to a second language, but it generally decreases with age in older adults. Future studies should expand the investigation of prosodic boundaries to more pragmatic genres and focus on revealing the cognitive mechanisms underlying prosodic boundary processing, the relationship between prosodic boundary and syntax processing, and the development of prosodic boundary perception in second language learners.

Key words: prosodic boundary, spoken language comprehension, acoustic characteristics, neural oscillation

CLC Number:

B842

FANG Lan, ZHENG Yuanyi, JIN Han, LI Xiaoqing, YANG Yufang, WANG Ruiming. Prosodic boundaries in speech: A window to spoken language comprehension[J]. Advances in Psychological Science, 2021, 29(3): 425-437.

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