A multilingual study on intensity as a cue for marking prosodic boundaries

Speech intensity is one of the main prosodic cues, playing a role in most of the suprasegmental phenomena. Despite this, its contribution to the signalling of prosodic hierarchy is still relatively understudied, compared to the other cues, like duration or fundamental frequency. We present here an investigation on the role of intensity in prosodic boundary detection in four different languages, by testing several intensity measures. The statistical analysis performed showed significant correlates of prosodic boundaries, for most intensity measures employed and in all languages. Our findings were further validated with a classification experiment in which the boundary/non-boundary distinction was learned in unsupervised manner, using only intensity cues. It showed that intensity range measures outperform absolute intensity measures, with the total intensity range being consistently the best feature.