Kim Sahyang, Cho Taehong
Department of English Education, Hongik University, Seoul 121-791, Korea.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 May;125(5):3373-86. doi: 10.1121/1.3097777.
This study investigated the role of phrase-level prosodic boundary information in word segmentation in Korean with two word-spotting experiments. In experiment 1, it was found that intonational cues alone helped listeners with lexical segmentation. Listeners paid more attention to local intonational cues (...H#L...) across the prosodic boundary than the intonational information within a prosodic phrase. The results imply that intonation patterns with high frequency are used, though not exclusively, in lexical segmentation. In experiment 2, final lengthening was added to see how multiple prosodic cues influence lexical segmentation. The results showed that listeners did not necessarily benefit from the presence of both intonational and final lengthening cues: Their performance was improved only when intonational information contained infrequent tonal patterns for boundary marking, showing only partially cumulative effects of prosodic cues. When the intonational information was optimal (frequent) for boundary marking, however, poorer performance was observed with final lengthening. This is arguably because the phrase-initial segmental allophonic cues for the accentual phrase were not matched with the prosodic cues for the intonational phrase. It is proposed that the asymmetrical use of multiple cues was due to interaction between prosodic and segmental information that are computed in parallel in lexical segmentation.
本研究通过两项单词识别实验，探究了短语层面韵律边界信息在韩语单词切分中的作用。在实验1中，发现仅语调线索就能帮助听众进行词汇切分。与韵律短语内部的语调信息相比，听众更关注韵律边界处的局部语调线索（...H#L...）。结果表明，高频语调模式虽非唯一，但在词汇切分中会被使用。在实验2中，加入了词尾延长，以观察多种韵律线索如何影响词汇切分。结果显示，听众不一定能从语调线索和词尾延长线索的同时存在中受益：只有当语调信息包含不常见的用于边界标记的音调模式时，他们的表现才会得到改善，这表明韵律线索只有部分累积效应。然而，当语调信息对于边界标记是最优的（频繁出现）时，加入词尾延长会观察到较差的表现。这可以说是因为重音短语的短语起始部分的音段变体线索与语调短语的韵律线索不匹配。研究提出，多种线索的不对称使用是由于在词汇切分中并行计算的韵律信息和音段信息之间的相互作用。
