Recent work has proposed that prominence perception inspeech could be driven by predictability of prosodic patterns,connecting prominence perception to the concept of statisticallearning. In the present study, we tested the predictabilityhypothesis by conducting a listening test where subjects werefirst exposed to a 5-minute stream of sentences with a certainproportion of sentence-final words having either a falling orrising pitch trajectory. After the exposure stage, subjects wereasked to grade prominence in a set of novel sentences withsimilar pitch patterns. The results show that the subjects weresignificantly more likely to perceive words with low-probability pitch trajectories as prominent independently ofthe direction of the pitch change. This suggests that evenshort exposure to prosodic patterns with a certain statisticalstructure can induce changes in prominence perception,supporting the connection between prominence perceptionand attentional orientation towards low-probability events inan otherwise predictable context.

The human sensory system is capable to rapidly respond to novel input, allowing for quick allocation of attentionalresources to the stimulus. In a similar manner, prominent words in speech seem to attract the listeners’ attention and facilitate oralter interpretation. Sentence prominence has been typically studied across languages by examining configurations of acousticprosodic features during prominent words. Recent studies have provided evidence that, in addition to the predictability of thelexical units in speech, manipulating the predictability of the acoustic prosodic features can also signal prominence. In thiswork, we provide a high-level description of a cognitive framework that attempts to characterize sentence prominence as aphenomenon that is connected with the unpredictability of suprasegmental acoustic features, thereby capturing the attention ofthe listener and causing differential processing of prominent speech.

The exaggerated intonation and special rhythmic properties ofinfant-directed speech (IDS) have been hypothesized to attractinfant’s attention to the speech stream. However, studiesinvestigating IDS in the context of models of attention arefew. A number of such models suggest that surprising ornovel perceptual inputs attract attention, where novelty can beoperationalized as the statistical predictability of the stimulusin a context. Since prosodic patterns such as F0 contours areaccessible to young infants who are also adept statisticallearners, the present paper investigates a hypothesis that pitchcontours in IDS are less predictable than those in adult-directed speech (ADS), thereby efficiently tapping into thebasic attentional mechanisms of the listeners. Results fromanalyses with naturalistic IDS and ADS speech show that IDShas lower overall predictability of intonation acrossneighboring syllables even when the F0 contours in bothspeaking styles are normalized to the same frequency range.