In previous works, we proposed, on the basis of acoustic analysis and synthesis, that intonation can be cognitively and linguistically described by a lexicon of prosodic contours. The aim of the present work is to validate on the French language such an approach in perception processing. Two experiments are described hereafter. The first one consists in evaluating on complete utterances the identification of the six attitudes currently implemented in the ICP TTS system. The second one is a gating experiment which aims at showing a stable and early identification of attitudes. Perception results are commented and compared to the acoustic forms to analyse the relation between the perceptive and prosodic points of unicity if any.