Prosodic cues to syntactic boundaries

The systematic differences of temporal and frequency parameters of syllable sets at the word,word group, phrase, clause and sentence boundaries were investigated. It was found that （1） temporal parameters of the syllable immediate before the boundaries change significantly, but do not for syllables in other positions, （2） for syllables before boundaries the sum of duration and following pause increase linearly with the level of boundaries, （3） the duration of the syllable increases at first before word group and phrase boundaries, and then decreases before clause and sentence boundaries, （4） the pause duration increases dramaticaly as the level of boundary is higher, （5） the average values of foundamental frequencies decrease as boundary level is higher.