Prominence perception in and out of context

Abstract

The perception of prosodic prominence is known to be in- fluenced by several distinct factors. In this study, we investi- gated the role of context, both global and local, in the promi- nence judgements of na ¨ ive listeners. Monolingual English lis- teners marked where they heard prominence on pairs of two- word phrases (e.g.blue ball,green drum). Stimuli varied in whether or not the first phrase implied a contrastive focus on the second phrase. We found clear evidence of a hierarchy of prominence across pitch accent types: L+H*>H*>!H*> unaccented. Additionally, we found that contrast status only af- fected prominence markings when the participants were made explicitly aware of the discourse context and were instructed to imagine themselves physically present to observe the con- versation. This effect of global context suggests that informa- tion structure cannot be reliably interpreted in the absence of an established discourse context. Taken together, these results suggest that nalisteners are sensitive to prominence differ- ences at levels corresponding to categorical annotations. Per- ception of a word's relative prominence was consistently influ- enced by phonetic and phonological factors, while pragmatic factors (such as contrast-evoking context) required more elab- orate plausibility manipulations in order to affect prominence perception. Index Terms: prominence, perception, discourse, focus, con- trast

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