What´s in the “pure” prosody?

Detectors for accents and phrase boundaries have been developed which derive prosodic features from the speech signal and its fundamental frequency to support other modules of a speech understanding system in an early analysis stage, or in cases where no word hypotheses are available. The detectors´ underlying Gaussian distribution classifiers were trained with 50 minutes and tested with 30 minutes of spontaneous speech, yielding recognition rates of 74% for accents and 86% for phrase boundaries. Since this material was prosodically hand labelled, the question was: which labels for phrase boundaries and accentuation were only guided by syntactic or semantic knowledge, and which ones are really prosodically marked? Therefore a small test subset has been resynthesized in such a way that comprehensibility was lost, but the prosodic characteristics were kept. This subset has been relabelled by 11 listeners with nearly the same accuracy as the detectors