Perception of prominence by Japanese and American listeners.

Acoustic cues to prosodic prominence are different in Japanese (mainly F0) and English (duration, F0, and intensity), but F0 change is involved in coding prominence in both languages. Japanese native speakers perceive a syllable as prominent (accented) if there is a sharp F0 fall originating in the syllable [Vance, (1987); Pierrehumbert & Beckman, (1988); Kubozono, (1993)]. It is not clear, however, whether native speakers of English interpret the F0 fall as a cue to prominence. In this study, participants are asked to identify a prominent syllable in each of the three‐syllable words varying in (a) the location of the F0 maximum (the midpoint of the first or second syllable), (b) the height of the F0 maximum (10‐Hz step increments from 200 to 250 Hz), and (c) the degree of the F0 fall between the accented and the following syllables (two levels). All stimuli are nonce words phonologically plausible in both Japanese and English. In our analysis we explore the role of each of the three manipulated parameter...