Perception of prosodic prominence in Spanish

In Spanish, the main prosodic prominence of a sentence is supposed fall within the focus of the sentence (= focus prominence rule. This experiment tested the correspondence between perceived prominence and actual focus using Rapid Prosody Transcription. Subjects had to indicate for a total of 56 stimuli the locus of the perceived max. prosodic prominence. The stimuli used in the experiment were produced in a prior production experiment in the context of a wh-question, i.e. they display a narrow information focus. 40 monolingual native speakers of European Spanish participated in the experiment. The main result is that in less than 30% of the answers the perceived prominence matches the focus, calling into question the focus prominence rule. Follow-up studies will deal with the following questions:

-- Do we find a higher degree of matching between focus and prosodic prominence in other data types (e.g. read texts)?

-- Does the degree of matching between focus and prosodic prominence depend on the syntactic complexity of the stimuli (the present experiment tested rather complex structures)?

18.12.2018