In order to gain knowledge about the interaction between topdown expectations of listeners concerning prosodic prominence and its acoustic correlates, two exploratory empirical studies were carried out. First, native and nonnative subjects rated prominences of speech read at normal and very fast —prosodically very different — speech. Later, these ratings were compared with introspective promine...

This paper discusses recent findings in the online sentence processing research that suggest to consider gender information a prominence feature. Prominence features are hierarchically ordered information types that interact with formal features of arguments (e.g., grammatical functions, thematic roles) and thus determine the readers' ability to efficiently interpret linguistic ambiguities. Whi...

A precise identification of prosodic phenomena and the construction of tools able to properly manage such phenomena are essential steps to disambiguate the meaning of certain utterances. In particular they are useful for a wide variety of tasks: automatic recognition of spontaneous speech, automatic enhancement of speechgeneration systems, solving ambiguities in natural language interpretation,...

French and German differ with respect to the representation and implementation of prominence. French can be assumed to have no prominence represented in the mental lexicon and accents are regularly assigned post-lexically on the last full vowel of an accentual group. In German, prominence is considered to be represented lexically. This difference may give rise to interferences when German speak...

A Bulgarian and a German sentence were presented to Bulgarian and German listeners together with a question which either expected an early narrow focus or a late narrow focus. The answering sentences were manipulated so that the word in the latefocused position ranged from completely de-accented to strongly accented. The early focused position was neutral, allowing latefocus perception with lat...

There are two levels of rhythmic structure which are assumed to play a role in language acquisition: the basic rhythmic level and the first phrasal level. While the former is supposed to guide infants in language discrimination (Mehler and Nespor 2004), the latter signals the order of words within phrases. In particular, in Nespor et al. (1996), the hypothesis that relative prominence, that is ...

Two experiments explored discourse and communicative factors that contribute to the perceived prominence of a word in an utterance, and how that prominence is realized acoustically. In Experiment 1 two hypotheses were tested: (1) acoustic prominence is a product of the given-new status of a word and (2) acoustic prominence depends on the degree to which a referent is accessible, where greater a...

In the present study we investigated the effect of semantic context on the perception of words that differ only in the lexical stress pattern. Our study was based on the disyllabic German word AUGUST. Depending on whether the lexical stress is on the first or the second syllable the word refers to either a name or a month. By means of a forced-choice identification experiment we tested to what ...

The relation between focus and prosody has long been recognized (Halliday 1967, 1970; Chomsky 1971; JackendoV 1972), but it remains an issue of contention as to how this relation is established. On the one hand, focus has an eVect on grammatical meaning. On the other hand, phrasal prominence plays an important role in determining which parts of the sentence can be interpreted as focused, i.e. a...