Prominence Judgements and Textual Structure in Discourse1

In this paper the perceptual evaluation of a method to analyse the information structure of a discourse (Van Donzel, 1994) is discussed. In this evaluation listeners were presented with spoken versions of a retold story in Dutch, and were asked to mark those parts in the text they perceived as being emphasized, under the assumption that these are the most salient parts of the discourse. The results of the experiment indicate that the method represents fairly well the way listeners perceive information structure, but that it needs to be refined and adapted in certain aspects. These adjustments are discussed as well.