Variations in the perceptual modelling of macro- prosodic organization of spoken Swedish: prominence and chunking

In a pilot investigation, aiming to develop new methodological insights into the study of perceptual modelling of the macro-prosodic organization of spoken Swedish, different aspects of the listeners’ variation were studied. Two listener groups, students at the beginner’s level and trained phoneticians, had to mark the most prominent words and the chunks they could hear in speech samples of spontaneous Standard Swedish produced by a female and a male speaker. Variations concerning each prominent word and chunk, the number of scores per item and the number of scores per listener are presented. In general, phonetically untrained listeners, compared to prosodists, are even more uncertain when they try to recognize prominent words and chunks in spoken Swedish.