Naïve listeners’ perceptions of French prosody compared to the predictions of theoretical models

In this study, naïve French listeners’ perceptions of prosody are compared to descriptions of prosodic structure in the literature, and to the results obtained in a similar experiment with American listeners (Cole et al. submitted). Untrained participants listened to recorded spontaneous speech, while following along on an unpunctuated transcript. The listeners were assigned to one of two groups: one group was asked to underline all the “important” (prominent) words, the other to mark locations where they perceived a break between two groups of words (phrasing). The French listeners demonstrated a strong tendency to mark as prominent those words immediately preceding locations perceived as phrase boundaries. This tendency agrees with descriptions of French accentual groups as ending with a prominence. However, the listeners marked boundaries on average approximately every ten words, implying phrasal groupings far longer than accentual groups. A possible explanation is that the listeners were actually marking Intonational Phrases.