Stages of prosodic and segmental processing in speech perception

This project showed that listeners are better able to identify and parse words from the speech signal when multiple cues (duration and pitch) signaled the location of the word boundary as compared to when the boundary was signaled by one cue only. These findings contribute to our understanding of how listeners can make use of multiple types of information (i.e. word identity and boundary location) that are simultaneously encoded in the speech signal.
The project also showed that Northern Finnish, a quantity language which uses duration to signal meaningful differences between words, restricts the prosodic use of duration at word and phrase boundaries in order to preserve the quantity distinction between phonemes.