Objective, Subjective and Linguistic Roads to Perceptual Prominence How are they compared and why?

Prosodic prominence denotes the perceptual salience of linguistic units. There exists no agreement on (1) ade-quate methods for its subjective measurement, (2) its ob-jective acoustic correlates and (3) its relationship to lin-guistic structure. A traditional approach for evaluating any of these descriptive layers is an inter-level compari-son, e.g. between a perceptual and an acoustic model of prominence. However, (1) there exists no standard pro-cedure for such a comparison, and (2) such a comparison is misleading if both layers are expected to be symmetri-cal, given the neglected influence of linguistic top-down expectancies. We propose an evaluation procedure for prominence models relying on tripartite correlations of perception, its acoustic correlates and linguistic expecta-tions. We suggest a novel correlation metric and test its usefulness on a prosodic corpus of German. Index Terms: prominence, evaluation, prosody 1. Introduction: Mode