Prosodic prominence and contextual patterns: evidence from German. Presented at the ICPL 2015

2005). However, little is known about how the immediate prosodic context affects both production and perception of prominence, with a few exceptions (e.g. Cutugno et al., 2012; Arnold et al., 2013). The issue of how context- understood as prosodic environment- shapes both prominence perception and production is explored in a corpus study. Our material was taken from the Bonn Prosodic Database (Heuft 1999), annotated using a quasi-gradual scale of 31 levels of syllable prominence. Our analyses reveal some interesting influences of context: first, the degree of perceived prominence is proportional to the distance to the previous accent (Spearman’s-σ(10684) = 0.23, p<0.0001, cf. Figure 1): Figure 1: Relationship between degree of prominence and syllable distance to previous accent Second, this relationship is exploited by speakers to economize their accent production, with pitch accents being less steep and produced with less delay with increasing distance to a previous accent (Spearman’s-σ(10684) <-0.15, p<0.001 for all variables). Third, there is a clear alternating pattern of perceived prominence (Pearson’s cc(10684) =-0,47, p<0.0001 for adjacent syllables), which is, however, not expressed in a strictly alternating duration pattern likewise