문장 단위 발화 종결의 운율 단서: 휴지를 중심으로

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how pauses function as prosodic cues in signaling utterance-final boundaries. A perception experiment was conducted in which listeners were asked to indicate the point at which they believed the speaker’s utterance had ended. The auditory stimuli were constructed by systematically manipulating both the location and duration of pauses within a sentence. The results showed that both response times and response rates varied depending on pause location and duration. Pauses following sentence-final endings led to faster and more frequent responses, while those after subjects or modifiers elicited slower and less consistent responses. Longer pauses increased the likelihood of finality judgments more than shorter ones, although even short pauses had a stronger effect than no-pause conditions. Overall, these findings demonstrate that both structural position and pause duration play key roles in finality judgments. They provide empirical evidence that pauses serve as important prosodic cues in perceiving utterance-final boundaries.