This study investigated speaker variation in the production of various acoustic cues of prominence, including duration and in- tensity measures. The Bayesian Information Criterion was used to specify a threshold distinction between cues that are linearly vs. piece-wise linearly predictors of the degree of perceived prominence. For all speakers, some features are linear and some features are discrete in the manner in which they cue promi- nence. However, the results also suggest that speakers differ in the number of prominence distinctions that they make. Under a metrical stress notion of hierarchically layered prominence, our result would suggest that some speakers do not exploit the full range of prominence distinctions offered in English.

Index Terms: speech prosody, prominence, Bayesian Informa- tion Criterion, speaker variation, corpus linguistics