On the Structure of Internal Prosodic Models

We investigate the structure of internal prosodic models. It is hypothesized that accumulations of perceived exemplars implicitly define prosodic target regions that are used in speech production. Results from two experimental studies on tonal and temporal events, respectively, are reported. The first study concerns the categorical status of high and low boundary tones in German in a categorical perception paradigm. The aim of this experiment is to establish a methodology for testing the categorical status of prosodic events. In the second experiment we use z-scores as a measure of local speech rate. We demonstrate that this is an appropriate measure for the temporal dimension of perceptual target regions that are related to prosodic categories.