Acoustic Cues of Prosody Phrasing in Lithuanian at Different Speech Rates

The aim of this research is to determine whether pauses, decreases in intensity, pitch lowering, lengthening of the final sound, and certain voice quality features are equally significant in marking phrase boundaries at different reading rates.The research material consists of 9 recordings of Aesop's fable "The North Wind and the Sun".This text was read by three male actors 3 times: at a natural reading rate, at a fast reading rate, and at a slow reading rate.The presence and duration of pauses, the intensity and F0 of the entire phrase and its final syllable, as well as the duration, intensity, F0, jitter, shimmer, and HNR of the final vowel at the end and in phrase-internal position, were analysed.The results indicate that all parameters can serve as indicators of phrase boundaries, particularly for intonational phrases.Intonational phrases can be differentiated from intermediate phrases based on the level of intensity decrease, jitter, and to some extent, pauses and F0 lowering.However, among these parameters, only duration-related features, such as pauses and the lengthening of the final sound, show a more prominent sensitivity to changes in reading rate.