The perceptual prominence of pitch accent types in German

The paper reports on a web-based perception experiment investigating the perceptual prominence of seven attested nuclear pitch accent types plus deaccentuation in German. Unlike previous studies which link prominence judgments of accents to aspects of intonational meaning, the present study directly asks for the perceived degree of prosodic prominence. Results reveal gradual differences between accent types, which can be defined along three tonal dimensions which have an impact on prominence perception: the direction of pitch movement (rises being more prominent than falls), the degree of pitch excursion (steeper excursion adding to the degree of prominence) and the height of the starred tone (high accents being more prominent than downstepped and low accents).