Prosodic Strengthening in Speech Production and Perception

This paper discusses some current issues regarding how prosodic structure is manifested in fine-grained phonetic details, how prosodically-conditioned articulatory variation is explained in terms of speech dynamics, and how such phonetic manifestation of prosodic structure may be exploited in spoken word recognition. Prosodic structure is phonetically manifested in prosodically important landmark locations such as prosodic domain-final position, domain-initial position and stressed/accented syllables. It will be discussed how each of the prosodic landmarks engenders particular phonetic patterns, how articulatory variation in such locations are dynamically accounted for, and how prosodically-driven fine-grained phonetic detail is exploited by listeners in speech comprehension.