In intonational phonology and speech syn- thesis research, it has been suggested that the relative informativeness of a word can be used to predict pitch prominence. The more information conveyed by a word, the more likely it will be accented. But there are oth- ers who express doubts about such a correla- tion. In this paper, we provide some empiri- cal evidence to support the existence of such a correlation by employing two widely ac- cepted measures of informativeness. Our ex- periments show that there is a positive corre- lation between the informativeness of a word and its pitch accent assignment. They also show that informativeness enables statisti- cally significant improvements in pitch ac- cent prediction. The computation of word informativeness is inexpensive and can be incorpora...

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