The present paper reports the results of a perceptual experiment that was conducted in order to find out to what extent naïve, untrained labelers can benefit from prosodic information present in spontaneous narratives so as to derive an underlying structure associated with them. Results from inter-rater agreements suggest that even when the lexical, syntactic, and semantic information of a narrative is blocked, labelers can still identify its underlying structure, which clearly indicates that listeners make substantial use of prosodic information in the task of identifying the structure of spontaneous narratives.

Index Terms: spontaneous narrative, structure, prosody, perception