Prosodic and syntactic segmentation of spontaneous speech: A preliminary study

In this paper we examine prosodic and syntactic segmentation of spoken Finnish language. Syntactic sentence or clause is generally mentioned as one of the basic units of language, but it can be questioned whether it is a good unit for analysing the structure of spontaneous speech. By wavelet-based analysis, the prosodic structure of speech can be represented as a tree diagram, making it possible to compare prosodic and syntactic hierarchical structures of spoken language. As a first step, we compare here syntactically and prosodically defined speech segments and their boundaries. Our preliminary results show many similarities but also discrepancies between the prosodic and syntactic segments of spontaneous Finnish speech. These results serve as a good starting point for further comparison of syntactic and prosodic structures of spoken language.