The present study investigated the perception of phrase-level prosodic prominence in American English, using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) task. We had two basic goals. First, we sought to examine how listeners’ subjective impressions of prominence relate to phonology, defined in terms of Autosegmental-Metrical distinctions in (a) pitch accent status and (b) pitch accent type. Second, and in line with this special issue, we sought to explore how phonology might mediate the effects of other cues to prominence, both signal-based (acoustic) and signal-extrinsic (stimulus and listener properties) in nature. Findings from a large-scale RPT experiment (N = 158) show prominence perception in this task to vary significantly as a function of phonology; a word’s perceived prominence is significantly dependent on its accent status (unaccented, prenuclear accented, or nuclear accented) and to a slightly lesser extent, on pitch accent type (L*, !H*, H*, or L+H*). In addition, the effects of other known cues to prominence—both signal-based acoustic factors as well as more “top-down” signal-extrinsic factors—were found to vary systematically depending on accent status and accent type. Taken together, the results of the present study provide further evidence for the complex nature of prominence perception, with implications for our knowledge of prosody perception and for the use of tasks like RPT as a method for crowdsourcing prosodic annotation.

本研究使用快速韵律转录（RPT）任务调查了美式英语中短语级韵律韵律的感知。我们有两个基本目标。首先，我们试图研究听众的主观突出印象与语音学之间的关系，语音学是根据（a）音调状态和（b）音调类型的自动段-格律上的区别来定义的。其次，为了解决这一特殊问题，我们试图探讨音系学如何介导自然界中基于信号的（声学的）和基于信号的非本征的（刺激和听众的特性）其他提示的作用。大规模RPT实验的结果（N = 158），表明此任务中的突出感会随着语音的变化而显着变化；一个单词的感知突出程度主要取决于其重音状态（未重音，核前重音或核重音），而在某种程度上则取决于音高重音类型（L * 、! H *，H *或L + H *）。此外，还发现了其他已知的突出提示的影响-基于信号的声学因素以及更多的“自上而下”的信号外部因素-根据重音状态和重音类型而系统地变化。综上所述，本研究的结果为突出感知的复杂性提供了进一步的证据，这对我们对韵律感知的了解以及将RPT之类的任务用作众包韵律注释的方法都具有启示意义。