Order Effects on the Perception of Relative Prominence

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German investigating the relative prominence of target words in two positions in a sentence. Listeners judged for each position which of four prominence levels were perceived as accented or unaccented. While subjects clearly distinguished between strongly accented and unaccented (i.e. postlexically stressed and unstressed) words in both positions, we found an order effect for weak pitch accents. They were not perceived as accents in prenuclear but they were in nuclear position. In general, listeners proved to be less sensitive to categorical prominence judgements in prenuclear position (also reflected in longer reaction times) than in nuclear position, which confirms the special functional status of nuclear pitch accents.