Tonal features, intensity, and word order in the perception of prominence

The perception of prominence as a function of sentence stress in Finnish was investigated in four experiments. Listeners judged the relative prominence of two consecutive nouns in a three-word utterance, where the accentuation of the nouns was systematically varied by tonal means. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated both the tonal features underlying the subjects’ responses as well as the influence of word order on the perceived prominence of the two accented words. The results showed that similar tonal features regardless of other phonetic differences conditioned the subjects’ judgments of prominence. They further showed that changing the word order influenced the distribution of responses in the two experiments. Two further experiments were administered to check the possible influence of slight tonal and intensity differences in the first two experiments. Only intensity was found to affect the distribution of judgments. Furthermore, the influence was local and only affected the last of the two words. Overall the results suggest that the most important tonal features responsible for the perception of prominence form a so-called flat-hat pattern. That also indicates that different kinds of focus structure influence the perception of prominence even when the judgments are based on decisions about the place of sentence stress.