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) adequate methods for its subjective measurement, (2) its objective acoustic correlates and (3) its relationship to linguistic structure. A traditional approach for evaluating any of these descriptive layers is an inter-level comparison, e.g. between a perceptual and an acoustic model of prominence. However, (1) there exists no standard procedure for such a comparison, and (2) such a comparison is misleading if both layers are expected to be symmetrical, 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 expectations. We suggest a novel correlation metric and test its usefulness on a prosodic corpus of German.