Acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence for naïve listeners of American English

0. Introduction This study examines the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence as perceived by a large number of native listeners of American English who are naïve to the phonetics and phonology of prosody. In English, as in other stress languages, speech utterances are chunked into smaller prosodic phrases, and within a prosodic phrase some words are assigned phrasal stress, which typically marks a word or a phrase as having a focus or as introducing new information into the discourse. We refer to phrasal stress here as prosodic prominence. Speakers convey the information structure of an utterance through prosodic prominence, and listeners must decode the prosodic structure to recover the speaker’s intended meaning in the course of comprehension. Prosodic structures are phonetically implemented in patterns of pitch (a perceptual attribute of fundamental frequency, F0), duration, loudness (a perceptual attribute of the intensity of sound pressure), and spectral modulations including formants. Pitch as a perceptual correlate of F0 is traditionally described as a primary cue for prominence in many languages, including American English (Beckman 1986, Pierrehumbert 1980). Many studies have investigated F0 as a primary cue for prominence in many languages. Terken (1991, 1994) tested the relative importance of the magnitude of F0 changes or F0 maxima in the perception of prominence in Dutch and these properties of F0 worked together in a complex way to cue prominence. Gussenhoven and Rietveld (1988) and Gussenhoven et al. (1997) also examined the relation between F0 maxima and minima and prominence perception in Dutch and showed that the relative distance between pitch peaks as well as the degree of declination of the baseline is important in the perception of prominence. The role of F0 as a primary cue for prominence is, however, still controversial. Other acoustic measures have also been investigated as correlates of prominence, although the definition of prominence varies across studies. For instance, Cooper et al. (1985) showed that prominent words (contrastively accented) have elongat-