Prosodic and Non-Prosodic Cues to Prominence and Boundaries: Evidence from an RPT study in Albanian

This paper reports evidence from the Rapid Prosody Transcription method (RPT, cf. Cole & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2016) in the study of a little-described language. We bring forth results from two perception experiments on the prosody of Albanian, which provide important evidence in the perceptibility of prosodic and non-prosodic correlates in the language’s prosodic system, shedding more light on its complexity. Albanian listeners in this study show moderate to substantial agreement in the perception of both prosodic prominences and boundaries, conforming to what has been found in RPT studies from other languages so far (Cole at al, 2010; Baumann & Winter, 2015; Riesberg at al, 2020). In doing so, listeners’ perception of prosodic structure correlates with both prosodic cues, i.e. PoLaR intonational categories (Ahn et al, 2019), and non-prosodic cues, i.e. syntactic break and part of speech, suggesting that these factors may serve as cues to prominence and boundary perception.