A comparison of discrete and continuous prominence perception methods in German

In this paper we report on three methods to investigate syllable-based prominence identification on a set of German read sentences: prosodic expert annotations of pitch accentuation, as well as a Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) style task and a finger-tapping task performed by naive listeners. In the present study, audio recordings of the speech materials used to elicit prominence judgments were supplemented by signals collected with miniature accelerometers placed on the throat skin below the glottis, allowing for a more reliable investigation of the contribution of voice quality. Various other signal-based parameters are correlated with prominence judgments to confirm if findings from previous work on word-based prominence judgments also hold for judgments at the syllable level. Results replicate past findings for German and other languages: the presence and type of pitch accentuation are reliable predictors of prominence judgments by naive listeners, on both the RPT and tapping task. Various individual acoustic parameters such as f0, duration and intensity were once again found to systematically covary with greater perceived prominence. A direct comparison of tapping and RPT results moreover indicated that beyond pitch accent related factors, listeners may employ different strategies to judge prominence as a function of task. In the RPT, they rely more on their knowledge of whether a given syllable carries lexical stress, whereas in the tapping task, they attend relatively strongly to acoustic duration. It is also shown that voice quality varies along with prominence ratings, but less strongly than other features such as duration.