Prosodic Phrase in Spoken Czech

The monograph Prosodic Phrase in Spoken Czech provides a missing source of information on a crucial element in the sound structure of the Czech language: the prosodic phrase. The introductory chapters offer a concise lead-in even to non-specialists: they explain the nature and typical approaches to speech prosody and offer an overview of the commonly used hierarchy of prosodic units.

The core of the study is based on speech material that was produced with legitimate communicative intents: storytelling, newsreading and poetry reciting. Prosodic phrases in the given material are described in terms of their phonetic structure, acoustic properties, and a specific syntactic issue. Moreover, the perceptual importance of prosodic phrasing is discussed together with a presentation of original perception experiments. A short chapter is dedicated to automatic detection of prosodic breaks by artificial neural networks. Apart from interesting facts about a core unit of prosodic structure, the prosodic phrase, the book can serve as a source of data in designing further experiments with natural language.