Great Expectations – Introspective vs. Percept their Acoustic Correl

In order to gain knowledge about the interaction between topdown expectations of listeners concerning prosodic prominence and its acoustic correlates, two exploratory empirical studies were carried out. First, native and nonnative subjects rated prominences of speech read at normal and very fast —prosodically very different — speech. Later, these ratings were compared with introspective prominence ratings of different listeners. First results indicate a major influence of the introspection on prominence ratings, especially if acoustic cues are difficult to interpret, as it is the case in very fast speech. Compared to native subjects, nonnatives rely less on their introspection and more on the acoustics. 1. Acoustic and Phonological Prominence Prediction and Perception Algorithms of prominence prediction that are based on phonological and morpho-syntactic information perform quite well. Their evaluation on the basis of perceptual prominence ratings shows good results (e.g. [1]). Also, the acoustic correlates of perceptual prominence are quite well-known – F0, duration and spectral tilt have been claimed to be the most important cues for a number of languages, even though the relative proportion of each parameter may be language specific. It is also well-known that the listeners’ psychoacoustic sensitivity for variations in duration, F0 or intensity differs dramatically between speech and non-speech stimuli [2]. One of the reasons for this is that prominence and its verified acoustic correlates do not stand in a 1:1 relationship. Instead, there is a complex interaction between acoustic prosody and listeners’ top down expectancies concerning lexical or sentence stress. The latter is based on their linguistic competence, the former based on their perception. [3] detected high correlations between perceptual prominence ratings and well-known acoustic correlates. But they claim that: 1 Spectral tilt or spectral slope is commonly regarded as the relative intensity of high versus low frequencies. No standardized measurement of spectral tilt has been established yet. “The