REITERANT SPEECH - AN ACOUSTIC AND PERCEPTUAL VALIDATION

Syllable durations for nonreiterant and reiterant ambiguous sentences were measured to seek evidence of the duration difference which can enable listeners to resolve surface structure ambiguities in nonreiterant speech. These duration patterns were found in both nonreiterant and reiterant speech. A perceptual study tested listeners' perception of these ambiguous sentences as spoken by four ″good″ speakers - speakers who neutralized intrinsic duration differences and whose sentences were independently rates by skilled listeners as good imitations of normal speech. The listeners were able to choose the correct interpretation when the ambiguous sentences were in reiterant as well as they did when the sentence were spoken normally. These results support the notion that reiterant speech is like nonreiterant speech in aspects which are important in the study of prosody.