Are Verbs Less Prominent?

The perceived prominence of three parts of speech (POS), nouns, verbs and adjectives, in three utterance positions, initial, intermediate and final, were examined in a perceptual experiment to see whether previously observed reductions in prominence of intermediate items were the result of positional effects or because words in this position belonged to the same POS, namely verbs. It was found that the perceived prominence of all three POS was reduced in intermediate position, and that the effect of POS membership was marginal, although adjectives tended to be slightly more prominent than nouns and verbs.