Phonology, phonetics, and signal-extrinsic factors in the perception of prosodic prominence: Evidence from Rapid Prosody Transcription

Abstract

The present study investigated the perception of phrase-level prosodic prominence in American English, using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) task. We had two basic goals. First, we sought to examine how listeners’ subjective impressions of prominence relate to phonology, defined in terms of Autosegmental-Metrical distinctions in (a) pitch accent status and (b) pitch accent type. Second, and in line with this special issue, we sought to explore how phonology might mediate the effects of other cues to prominence, both signal-based (acoustic) and signal-extrinsic (stimulus and listener properties) in nature. Findings from a large-scale RPT experiment (N = 158) show prominence perception in this task to vary significantly as a function of phonology; a word’s perceived prominence is significantly dependent on its accent status (unaccented, prenuclear accented, or nuclear accented) and to a slightly lesser extent, on pitch accent type (L*, !H*, H*, or L+H*). In addition, the effects of other known cues to prominence—both signal-based acoustic factors as well as more “top-down” signal-extrinsic factors—were found to vary systematically depending on accent status and accent type. Taken together, the results of the present study provide further evidence for the complex nature of prominence perception, with implications for our knowledge of prosody perception and for the use of tasks like RPT as a method for crowdsourcing prosodic annotation.