Naïve listeners’ prominence and boundary perception

This paper examines how ordinary listeners, naïve with respect to the phonetics and phonology of prosody, perceive the location of prosodic boundaries that demarcate speech “chunks” and prominences that serve a “highlighting” function, in spontaneous speech (Buckeye corpus). Over 70 naïve listeners marked the locations of prominences and boundaries in a real-time transcription task. Fleiss’ multitranscribers’ reliability tests show that naïve transcribers are consistent in their perception of prosodic boundaries and prominences. Specifically, we observe higher multi-transcriber agreement scores for boundary marking than for prominence marking. Variation between transcriptions of the same speech excerpt produced by different listeners reveals individual differences in the perception of prominences and boundaries. Variation in Fleiss’ multi-transcribers’ agreement scores for excerpts from different speakers suggests that speakers vary in how they structure an utterance prosodically and/or in how effectively they cue prosodic structure. We also find that nuclear prominences are more consistently perceived by naïve listeners than prenuclear prominences. The finding that naïve listeners agree well above chance on the location of prosodic events indicates that naïve transcription is a valid method for prosody analysis which can augment analysis based solely on expert labeling.