Larkey, Leah S.
Notes on: Reiterant Speech: an acoustic and perceptual validation
In: Journal of the Acoustical Society America, 73(4)
April 1982
Abstract
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Reiterant speech, or nonsense syllable mimicry, has been proposed as a
way to study prosody, particularly syllable and word durations,
unconfounded by segmental influences. Researchers have shown that
segmental influences on durations can be neutralised in reiterant
speech. If it is to be a useful tool in the study of prosody, it must
also be shown that reiterant speech preserves the suprasegmental
duration and intonation differences relevant to perception. In the
present study, syllable durations for nonreiterant and reiterant
ambiguous sentences were measured to seek evidence of the duration
differences which can enable listeners to resolve surface structure
ambiguities in nonreiterant speech. These duration patterns were found
in both nonreiterant and reiterant speech. A perceptual study tested
listeners' perception of these ambiguous sentences as spoken by four
"good" speakers - speakers who neutralised intrinsic duration
differences and whose sentences were independently rated by skilled
listeners as good imitations of normal speech. The listeners
were able to choose the correct interpretation when the ambiguous
sentences were in reiterant form as well as they did when the sentences
were spoken normally. These results support the notion that reiterant
speech is like nonreiterant speech in aspects which are important
in the study of prosody.
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Alison Tunley
Phonetics Laboratory, Department of Linguistics
University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge, CB3 9DA
homepage: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~ajt20
tel: +44 1223 335026; fax: +44 1223 335053
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