Prominence Perception: The Role of Signal, Linguistic Experience and Age

Prominence has long been a central concept in prosody research, although its definition remains a topic of debate. Informally defined as ‘something standing out’, prominence is relevant for metrical strength (e.g. a lexically stressed syllable is more prominent than unstressed syllables within a word, ‘univérsity’), information structure (e.g. an emphasised word is more prominent than other words in an utterance, ‘I said BROWN not red!’) and it is considered a structural property in language (e.g. English speakers tend to perceive the syllable with final pitch accent in an utterance as prominent). Cross-linguistic studies indicate that some languages do not utilise prominence, while others show different prominence systems, such as head-prominence—where a lexically stressed syllable serves as the "head" of a unit like a foot (e.g. English, German)—or edge-prominence, where prominence arises from a syllable's position at the beginning or end of a phrase (e.g. French, Korean).

In cross-linguistic comparisons, speakers of West Germanic languages, such as English and German, generally show relatively clear intuitions about which syllables or words are prominent. However, defining prominence and identifying its acoustic correlates remain complex tasks, even in these languages. Recent studies suggest that both the signal (e.g. phonetic properties such as pitch and duration) and speakers’ expectations (e.g. position of the syllable or word within an utterance, word frequency) influence prominence perception.

This talk reviews recent debates in prominence research and presents empirical studies examining the roles of acoustic signals, linguistic experience, and age in prominence perception. In the experiments, participants judged relative prominence between two consecutive pitch accent peaks (rise-falls) or valleys (fall-rises) in a question utterance (e.g. ‘does Néllie know Lénny?’). Native English speakers across different age groups and dialects participated. The findings reveal two key points. First, there is a robust perceptual asymmetry between pitch peaks and valleys, the valleys posing significant challenges in prominence perception. Although it was expected that speakers of English dialects with frequent valley-shaped accents such as Belfast English and Glaswegian English would outperform speakers from other regions in perceiving valley-shaped accents, this expectation was not met. Second, there was some evidence that younger and older listeners (60+ years old) differ in their prominence perception. Older listeners seemed to show a stronger response bias, consistently favouring one option, especially when faced with valley-shaped accents. These results highlight the intricate interaction between the physical properties of speech stimuli and listeners' top-down knowledge in the perception of speech intonation.