ETRW on Dialogue and Prosody September 1-3, 1999 Veldhoven, The Netherlands

Two Dimensions of Prominence

Petra Wagner and Thomas Portele

Institut für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik, Universität Bonn, Germany

Prosody fulfills a variety of functions in dialogues. Our study examines the relationship between different levels of perceived prominence of syllables and the linguistic and paralinguistic categories accent and emphasis which are conveyed prosodically. It is still unclear, how a notational system might look like that is able to capture the fine-grained differences between both. The notion of perceptual prominence - defined as a relational parameter on a scale between 0 and 31 - seems to be a useful phonetic measure to capture both the subtle differences and shared characteristics of the phenomena commonly referred to as linguistic and paralinguistic. Our data indicate that the overall level of prominence within an utterance reflects the level of emphasis, whereas the relative difference of prominences to each other distinguishes between different linguistic accent types.