Segment durations and accent as cues to word segmentation in Dutch

This paper investigates the relative contributions of accentuation and of durational word boundary cues to listeners' perceived word segmentation in Dutch. A listening experiment is reported, in which 36 two-word phrases with an ambiguous word boundary were used as stimuli. Four groups of 20 subjects each had to make a forced binary choice between the two contrastive boundary positions. Accent position on either the first or second word was varied between stimulus phrases. In both contrastive realizations of each ambiguous phrase, two durational boundary cues were manipulated, viz. duration of the pivotal consonant and rise time of the postboundary vowel. Results show that durational word boundary markers are perceptually relevant for subjects' perceived word segmentation, but only if the manipulated segment is realized as word-initial. Second, accuracy in perceived word segmentation is higher if the second word (following the ambiguous boundary position) is accented. The latter result is probably due to the higher acoustic and perceptual salience of durational as well as spectral boundary cues, which occur in initial position in the second word. Hence, the contribution of accent to word segmentation may be partly due to its "enhancing" effect on phonetic word boundary markers.