Prosodic phrasing in Russian spontaneous and read speech: evidence from large speech corpora

This paper explores the differences between spontaneous and read speech in terms of prosodic phrasing. For both types of speech material we analysed the following data: IP duration (in seconds) and IP length (in clitic groups); distribution of melodic types in the material; silent pause duration; the ratio between the number of silent pauses and the number of IP boundaries. The measurements were made over 30 hours of read and 15 hours of spontaneous Russian speech. Our data have revealed the following differences in prosodic phrasing between the two types of speech material. In spontaneous speech we observe (1) shorter IPs, (2) more IPs with non-final nucleus, (3) a different frequency distribution of intonation models. Silent pause duration and the ratio between the number of silent pauses and the number of IP boundaries are highly variable across speakers.