How final is final: The production and perception of utterance-medial and utterance-final boundaries

We examine the production and perception of two types of phrase-final prosodic boundaries, specifically, utterance-medial and utterance-final intonation phrase (IP) boundaries in German. These two types of boundaries are expected to differ in terms of general properties of the prosodic hierarchy, and properties of turn-taking and speech planning. In an articulatory magnetometer study and a perceptual rating study, we examine these boundaries in read speech, testing for temporal, spatial, and intonational properties of the boundaries. Only small and inconsistent differences were found in the temporal and spatial domains. The only robust difference is a lower f0 in the rhyme of the intonation contour for utterance-final IP boundaries compared to utterance-medial IP boundaries for five of the eight speakers. This is consistent with the results of the perception study, which indicate that listeners perceive subtle differences in the boundary-specific production, and that mean f0 during the rhyme and peak velocity were the information listeners used to determine utterance finality for the speakers producing the difference.