Perception of discourse boundaries and prominence in spontaneous Dutch speech

This paper describes the results of a perception experiment in which subjects listening to a retold story in Dutch were asked to mark various perceived discourse structures and to give their judgements on prominence in the verbatim transcription of that story. They marked discourse boundaries by means of conventional punctuation, indicating perceived non-final, sentence final, and paragraph final boundaries. Previously, the written versions had been analyzed for discourse structure on independent, non-prosodic grounds by experts in discourse analysis. This was done at a global level (phrasing) as well as at a local level (focal structure). The aim of the experiment was to see in what way the perceived structure of a discourse, in terms of boundaries and prominence, coincides with the one predicted by the objectively determined discourse structure