Abstract
We say that a linguistic entity is prosodically prominent when it stands out from its environment by virtue of its prosodic characteristics. That is, we define prominence as a property of a linguistic entity relative to an entity or a set of entities in its environment. Although the definition is cast in relative terms, it includes monosyllabic utterances, because they stand out from silence. In the acoustic domain, the primary prosodic properties bringing about these relative differences are amplitude, duration and ‘F0’ (we use F0 as a shorthand form for the inverse of the quasi-periodicity of the speech signal). The corresponding perceptual properties are loudness, duration or length, and pitch. Also, particular aspects of timbre come into play, such as those relating to vowel reduction, spectral slope or tilt, etc., and properties relating to voice quality, e.g. creak.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Beckman, M.E. 1986. Stress and Non-Stress Accent. Dordrecht: Foris.
Beckman, M.E. and Ayers, G. J. 1994. Guidelines for ToBI transcription. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, Linguistics Department (available by ftp from kiwi.nmt.edu)
Beckman, M.E. and Edwards, J. 1994. Articulatory evidence for differentiating stress categories. In P.A. Keating (ed), Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form. Papers in Laboratory Phonology Ill. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U.P., 1–33.
Beckman, M.E. and Pierrehumbert, J.B. 1986. Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3, 255–309.
Bolinger, D. 1958 A Theory of Pitch Accent in English. Word 14, 109–149.
Bolinger, D. 1961. Generality, Gradience, and the All-or-None. The Hague: Mouton. Bruce, G. 1977. Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective. Lund: Gleerup.
Bruce, G. 1987. On the phonology and phonetics of rhythm: evidence from Swedish. In W.U. Dressler et al. (eds), Phonologica 1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21–31.
Bruce, G. 1989. Report from the IPA Working Group on suprasegmental categories Working Papers 35 ( Dept.of Linguistics, Lund University ), 25–40.
Campbell, W.N. 1995. Prosodic influence on segmental quality. Proc. Eurospeech 95, 1011–1014.
Chomsky, N. and Halle, M. 1%8. The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
Cruttenden, A. 1986. Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Currie, K.L. 1980. An initial search for tonics. Language and Speech 23, 329–350.
Currie, K.L. 1981. Further experiments in the search for tonics. Language and Speech 24, 1–28.
Cutler, A. and Darwin, C.J. 1981. Phoneme-monitoring reaction time and preceding prosody: Effects of stop closure duration and of fundamental frequency. Perception and Psychophysics 29, 217–224.
Cutler, A. and Norris, D.G. 1988. The role of strong syllables in segmenting for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14, 113–121.
Edwards, J. and Beckman, M.E. 1988. Articulatory timing and the prosodic interpretation of syllable duration. Phonetica 45, 156–174.
De Jong, K. 1995. The supraglottal articulation of prominence in English: Linguistic stress as localized hyperarticulation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97, 491–504.
Fant, G. and Kruckenberg, A. 1988. Some durational correlates of Swedish prosody. Proc. Speech ‘88, 7th FASE Symposium, Edinburgh.
Fear, B.D., Cutler, A. and Butterfield, S. 1995. The strong/weak syllable distinction in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97, 1893–1904.
Fletcher, H. 1940. Auditory patterns. Reviews of Modern Physics 12, 47–61.
Fry, D.B. 1955. Duration and intensity as physical correlates of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 27, 765–768.
Fry, D.B. 1958. Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech 1, 126152.
Fujisaki, H. and Hirose, K. 1984. Analysis of voice fundamental frequency contours for declarative sentences of Japanese. Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan (E) 5, 233–242.
Glasberg B.R. and Moore B.C.J. 1990. Derivation of auditory filter shapes from notched-noise data. Hearing Research 47, 103–138.
Graddol D. 1986. Discourse specific pitch behavior. In C. Johns-Lewis (ed), Intonation in Discourse. London: Croom Helm, 221–237.
Grover, C. and Terken, J. 1995. The role of stress and accent in the perception of rhythm. Proc. XIIIth Int. Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Vol 4, 356–359.
Gussenhoven, C. and Rietveld, A.C.M. 1988. Fundamental frequency declination in Dutch: testing three hypotheses. Journal of Phonetics 16, 355–369.
Gussenhoven, C. and Rietveld, A.C.M. 1996. Estimating the location of the `Graph paper’: On the speaker-dependence of the perceived prominence of FO peaks. Ms., Nijmegen University.
Gussenhoven, C., Repp, B.H., Rietveld, A.C.M., Rump, H.H. and Terken, J. 1997. The perceptual prominence of fundamental frequency peaks. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 102, 3009–3022.
Hasegawa, Y. and Hata, K. 1992. Fundamental frequency as an acoustic cue to accent perception. Language and Speech 35, 87–98.
‘t Hart, J. 1981. Differential sensitivity to pitch distance, particularly in speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 69, 811–821.
‘t Hart, J. and Cohen, A. 1973. Intonation by rule: A perceptual quest. Journal of Phonetics 1, 309–327.
‘t Hart, J. and Collier, R. 1975. Integrating different levels of intonation analysis. Journal of Phonetics 3, 235–255.
‘t Hart, J., Collier, R. and Cohen, A. 1990. A Perceptual Study of Intonation: An Experimental-Phonetic Approach to Speech Melody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hermes, D.J. 1995. Timing of pitch movements and accentuation of syllables. IPO Annual Progress Report 30, 38–44.
Hermes, D.J. and Van Gestel, J. 1991. The frequency scale of speech intonation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 90, 97–102.
Hermes, D.J. and Rump, H.H. 1994. Perception of prominence in speech intonation induced by rising and falling pitch movements. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 96, 83–92.
Hirst, D., Di Cristo, A., and Espessser, R. This volume. Levels of representation and levels of analysis for the description of intonation systems.
Horne, M. 1987. Towards a Discourse-Based Model of English Sentence Intonation. Working Papers 32. ( Dept. of Linguistics, Lund University ).
Horne, M. 1990. Empirical evidence for a deletion formulation of the rhythm rule in English. Linguistics 28, 959–981.
Huss, V. 1978. English word stress in the Post-nuclear position. Phonetica 35, 86–105.
Ladd, D.R. 1993. On the theoretical status of the baseline in modelling intonation. Language and Speech 36, 435–451.
Ladd, D.R. 1994. Constraints on the gradient variability of pitch range, or, Pitch level 4 lives! In P. Keating (ed), Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form. Papers in Laboratory Phonology III. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 43–63.
Ladd, D.R., Verhoeven, J., and Jacobs, K. 1994. Influence of adjacent pitch accents on each other’s perceived prominence: two contradictory effects. Journal of Phonetics 22, 87–99.
Leenhardt, G. 1996. Automatic Labelling of Prosodic Events. Technical Report, Institute for Perception Research, Eindhoven NL.
Liberman, M., and Pierrehumbert, J. 1984. Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length. In M. Aronoff and R. Oehrle (eds), Language, Sound and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 157–233.
Liberman, M. and Prince, A. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8, 249–336.
Lieberman, P. 1965. On the acoustic basis of the perception of intonation by linguists. Word 21, 40–54.
Moulines E. and Laroche J. 1995. Non-parametric techniques for pitch-scale and time-scale modification of speech. Speech Communication 16, 175–205.
Needham, W.P. 1990. Semantic structure, information structure, and intonation in discourse production. Journal of Memory and Language 29, 455–468.
O’Shaughnessy, D. 1976. Modelling Fundamental Frequency, and its Relationship to Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics. Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge: MIT.
Pierrehumbert, J.B. 1979. The perception of fundamental frequency declination. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 66, 363–369.
Patterson, R.D. 1976. Auditory filler shapes derived with noise stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 59, 640–654.
Pierrehumbert, J.B. 1980. Thé Phonology and Phonetics of English Intonation. Ph.D Thesis, MIT, Distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Pierrehumbert, J.B. 1981. Synthesizing intonation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 70, 985–995.
Pierrehumbert, J.B. and Hirschberg, J. 1990. The meaning f international contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. Pollock (eds), Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 271–311.
Rietveld, A.C.M. and Gussenhoven, C. 1985. On the relation between pitch excursion size and prominence. Journal of Phonetics 13, 299–308.
Rump, H.H. 1996. Prominence of Pitch-Accented Syllables. Ph.D. Thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology. Eindhoven (NL).
Rump, H.H. and Collier, R. 1996. Focus conditions and the prominence of pitch-accented syllables. Language and Speech 39, 1–17.
Rump, H.H. and Hermes, D.J. 1996. Prominence of pitch-accented syllables and the ERB-rate scale, IPO Manuscript no. 1170 ( Institute for Perception Research, Eindhoven ).
Rump, H.H. and Hermes, D.J. 1996. Prominence lent by rising and falling pitch movements: testing two models. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 100, 1122–1131.
Selkirk, E. 1984. Phonology and Syntax: the Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Selkirk, E. 1995. Sentence prosody: Intonation, stress, and phrasing, In J. Goldsmith (ed), Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 550–569.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. 1994. ‘Stress shift’ as early placement of pitch accents: a comment on Edwards and Beckman. In P. Keating (ed), Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form. Papers in Laboratory Phonology Ill. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 34–42.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. 1995. The importance of phonological transcription in empirical approaches to stress shift versus early accent: comments on Grabe and Warren, and Vogel, Bunnell and Hoskins. In B Connell and A. Arvaniti (eds), Phonology and Phonetic Evidence. Papers in Laboratory Phonology IV. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 128–140.
Silverman, K., Beckman, M., Pitrelli, J., Ostendorf, M., Wightman, C., Price, P., Pierrehumbert, J., and Hirschberg, J. 1992. ToBI: A Standard for Labelling English Prosody. Proc. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Banff), 867–870.
Sluijter, A.M.C. 1995. Phonetic Correlates of Stress and Accent. Ph.D. Thesis, Leiden University. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics (HIL Dissertations 15 ).
Sluijter, A.M.C. and Van Heuven, V.J. 1996. Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 100, 2471–2485.
Stevens S.S., Volkmann J. and Newman E.B. 1937. A scale for the measurement of the psychological magnitude pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 8, 185–190.
Stevens, S.S. and Volkmann, J. 1940. The relation of pitch to frequency: a revised scale. American Journal of Psychology 53, 329–353.
Takeda, S. and Ichikawa, A. 1994. Analysis of prominence in spoken Japanese sentences and application to text-to-speech synthesis. Speech Communication 14, 171–196.
Terken, J. 1989. Reaction to C. Gussenhoven and A. Rietveld: Fundamental frequency declination in Dutch: testing three hypotheses. Letter to the Editor. Journal of Phonetics 17, 357–364.
Terken, J. 1991. Fundamental frequency and perceived prominence of accented syllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 89, 1768–1776.
Terken, J. 1993. Baselines revisited: Reply to Ladd. Language and Speech 36, 453–459.
Terken, J. 1994. Fundamental frequency and perceived prominence of accented syllables 11: Non-final syllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 95, 3662–3665.
Terken, J. 1997. Variation of accent prominence within the phrase: Models and spontaneous speech data. In Y. Sagisaka, W. Campbell and N. Higuchi (eds), Computing Prosody. New York: Springer, 95–116.
Trager, G.L. and Smith, H.L. 1951. An Outline of English Structure Studies in Linguistics. Occasional Papers 3. Washington: American Council of Learned Societies.
Traunmüller, 11., Branderud, P. and Bigestans, A. 1989. Paralinguistic speech signal transformations. Phonetic Experimental Research, Institute of Linguistics, University of Stockholm (PERIL US) 10, 47–64.
Traunmüller, H. and Eriksson, A. 1993. FO-excursions in speech and their perceptual evaluation as evidenced in liveliness estimations. Phonetic Experimental Research, Institute of Linguistics, University of Stockholm (PERILUS) 17, 1–34.
Traunmüller, H. and Eriksson, A. 1995. The perceptual evaluation of FO-excursions in speech as evidenced in liveliness estimations. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97, 1905–1915.
Van Heuven,V. 1987. Stress patterns in Dutch (compound) adjectives: Acoustic measurements and perception data. Phonetica 44, 1–12.
Van Katwijk, A. 1974. Accentuation in Dutch. Assen: Van Gorkum.
Zwicker, E. 1961. Subdivision of the audible frequency range into critical bands. J. of the Acoustical Society of America 33, 248.
Zwicker, E, Flottorp, G. and Stevens, S.S. 1957. Critical bandwidth in loudness summation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 29, 548–557.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Terken, J., Hermes, D. (2000). The Perception of Prosodic Prominence. In: Horne, M. (eds) Prosody: Theory and Experiment. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9413-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9413-4_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5562-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9413-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive