Bridging articulation and perception: The C/D model and contrastive emphasis

This paper compares prominence that listeners perceive with actual articulatory prominence. We calculated phrasal boundaries from articulatory patterns using an algorithm of the C/D model, and compared those calculated boundaries with perceived boundaries. The jaw displacements, measures of prominence, were measured using EMA; articulatory boundaries were derived from a C/D model algorithm. The data is a set of English sentences that vary in the placement of contrastive emphasis. Perception data were obtained from listeners who were asked to evaluate syllable prominence and syllable boundaries for these sentences. The results indicate that perception of syllable prominence shows strong correlations with articulatory prominence, showing that jaw displacement can be a strong perceptual cue for syllable prominence. Further, perception of syllable prominence is also correlated with algorithmicallycalculated articulatory syllable boundaries. These results encourage us to explore the relation between articulation and perception of language prosody in terms of the C/D model framework.