A set of perception experiments, using reiterant/lexicalized speech, were designed to carry out a diagnostic of the prosodic function of segmentation/hierarchization. Both natural and synthetic intonation were evaluated. Then, several dissimilarity measures - correlation, root-mean-square distance and mutual information on the acoustic parameters (F0, syllabic duration and intensity) - were applied to match the perceptive results. This objective vs. subjective comparison underlines which acoustic keys are used by listeners to judge the adequacy of prosody in performing a given function such as demarcation.