Phonology, phonetics, and signal-extrinsic factors in the perception of prosodic prominence: Evidence from Rapid Prosody Transcription

•Prominence perception is influenced by phonetics, phonology and other top-down factors.•A Rapid Prosody Transcription experiment in English found these factors to interact.•Phonological contrasts (pitch accent status and type) mediated the effects of other factors.•Listeners interpret phonetic and other variation in the context of a phonological parse of the signal.