Prominence perception is dependent on phonology, semantics, and awareness of discourse

The perception of prosodic prominence is thought to be influenced by multiple competing factors. Three experiments tested the effects of phonological salience, discourse context and listener’s knowledge about the discourse on prosodic prominence judgements, using short adjective–noun phrases extracted from a corpus of spontaneous speech. These phrases had either a prominent L + H* 0 or a less prominent H* !H* pitch accent contour. The phrases were presented in a discourse context which either supported or did not support a contrastive interpretation of the adjective. Effects of the contrastive context to increase the perception of prominence only emerged for the phrases with the phonologically prominent L + H* 0 pitch accent sequence. Additionally, the magnitude of the contrast effect was correlated with the listener’s awareness of the discourse context, suggesting an ample interplay between linguistic context, pragmatic context, and phonology in prominence perception.