Bridging the Segment-Prosody Divide in Speech Production and Perception

Phonetic expression is generally divided into sounds and prosodies. This collection of articles focuses on the interrelation of the two domains. Descriptive and experimental techniques are applied in speech production and perception to analyze sounds in different prosodic patterns, and prosodic patterns across different sounds at the levels of intonation, tone, emphatic intensification, lexical stress and foreign-accented speech. One of the striking results is that German fricatives /f/, /s/, /?/, /x/ are produced with higher-spectral energy distribution in high-rising than in falling f0 contours, and that the same fricative types in the two different prosodies sound high- versus low-pitched, and thus heighten the perception of the rising or falling intonation. The publication will be basic reading for anybody interested in bridging the separation into segments and prosodies, thus acquiring a more complete picture of human speech: phoneticians, linguists, applied linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, speech-technologists as well as foreign-language teachers.