PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The bulk of our current knowledge about articulatory/acoustic signatures of prosodic structure comes from paradigms that elicit discrete prosodic variation intentionally produced by subjects. In this paper, we collect speech elicited through continuous variation in tempo and hypo-hyper articulation, and analyze spontaneous emergence of high-level prosodic boundaries as a means of resolving low-level tempo and precision demands. Our data show that as the area of structural affordance for a prosodic boundary comes under decreasing temporal pressure, the temporal coordination patterns of the gestures in the vicinity of this affordance get continuously rearranged. This re-arrangement is comprehensively captured with the optimization-based embodied task dynamics platform (Simko & Cummins, 2010, 2011), in which this phenomenon can be modeled in terms of localized changes in relative demands on articulatory efficiency, perceptual clarity, and minimal duration, and the optimal resolution of these demands. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.