Perception of acoustic, informational and structural prominence in English, French, and Spanish.

Résumé En

Nuclear prominence is assigned to a word based on information status in some languages, while its location is fixed at the end of a phrase in others. We test how this difference affects prominence perception, comparing English, Spanish and French, languages that differ in the strength of the link between informational, positional and acoustic prominence. Using the method of Rapid Prosody Transcription, we compare prominence perception in English Spanish and French in relation to phrasal position and word frequency (a correlate of information status), and by directing listeners’ attention to acoustic criteria or to informational (“meaning-based” criteria). Prominence annotations were collected for spontaneous speech excerpts from 30 listeners of each language. Statistical results of mixed-effect regression show that word frequency as an informational factor most strongly influences prominence ratings for English, where prominence is the primary expression of information status. But despite differences in the phrasal location of nuclear prominence among these languages, the structural factor of adjacency to a prosodic boundary uniformly influences prominence perception based on acoustic criteria in all languages. Listeners in all three languages tend to perceive an acoustically-cued structural prominence on the phrase-final word, suggesting the primacy of a structural nuclear prominence in prosodic theory.