Determining prominence and prosodic boundaries in Korean by non-expert rapid prosody transcription

This paper examines how non-expert listeners perceive prominence and prosodic boundaries in Korean using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) method, developed by Mo, Cole and Lee [9] for American English. While prominence is used to mark prosodically salient or “highlighted” words and phrases, prosodic boundaries demarcate units or “chunks” of speech to mirror the hierarchical relations among prosodic structures. Confirming the findings of earlier studies on American English, nonexpert transcribers of Korean show agreement rates that are well above chance and, show higher agreement rates for prosodic boundaries than prominence. Korean listeners not only perceive prosodic boundaries at sentence-level boundaries corresponding to Intonation Phrase (IP) boundaries in the Korean Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) system, but also at clausal-level boundaries. The findings suggest that cues to boundaries are more salient than cues to prominences in Korean. For the perception of prominence, Korean listeners seem to orient to different cues including prosodic, syntactic and lexical information.