The Speechain Perspective : Form and Function of Prosodic Boundary Tones in Spontaneous Spoken Hebrew

Understanding speech depends on its segmentation into units, and prosody - the tone, intonation and rhythm of speech - is a crucial tool used by speakers for this purpose. This book provides a comprehensive description of the prosodic boundary patterns of spoken Israeli Hebrew (IH), by examining how Hebrew-speakers express sequences of utterances using a defined set of prosodic boundary tones. The study specifically focuses on the relationship between the syntagmatic and prosodic layers of spoken IH, thereby clarifying our understanding of the relationship between prosodic form and its linguistic function. This interface is modeled as the "speeCHain perspective", which demonstrates the chaining of speech units and the subsequent systematic linkage of syntactic units. The research was carried out on authentic IH everyday conversations, thus providing a unique contribution to present-day research. The analysis sheds light on the overall study of prosodic patterning in speech, and should be useful to speech scientists and speech technology engineers who may be considering modeling prosody in speech technologies.