Sound, structure and meaning: The bases of prominence ratings in English, French and Spanish

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

“…There is good empirical evidence that phrasing indeed affects perceptual prominence. For example, recent studies using Rapid Prosodic Transcription (Cole et al, 2010) has provided evidence that naïve listeners' intuitions about the prominence of a constituent are affected by the position within a phrase it occurs in, such that accented constituents at the end of phrases are perceived as more prominent than those phrase-internally (see also Bishop et al, this special issue;Cole et al, 2019 this Special Issue). 26 Our results raise some questions, however, whether it is indeed accurate to represent phrasal prominence and focal prominence in the same way.…”

Positional biases in predictive processing of intonation

“…Prenuclear accents have been described as "ornamental" (Büring 2007), and as placed for rhythmic purposes only (Calhoun 2007). They also have been described as having lesser acoustic prominence than nuclear accents and are less likely than nuclear accents to be perceived as prominent by listeners (Cole et al 2019). In artificial language learning experiments with English-speaking participants, these prenuclear components of the intonation contour are not paid attention to as much as nuclear components (Kapatsinski et al 2017).…”

Linguistic syncopation: Meter-syntax alignment affects sentence comprehension and sensorimotor synchronization

“…1.3 Evidence for a link A few key points of evidence help to motivate this hypothesis. First, syntactic structure cues the perception of phrasal stress over and above acoustic cues (Bishop et al, 2020;Cole et al, 2017Cole et al, , 2019Kentner & Vasishth, 2016;Wagner & McAuliffe, 2019). This underscores not only the cognitively constructed nature of metrical perception-it is not acoustic-but crucially suggests that people actively seek out meter-syntax alignment.…”