Which factors can be regarded as essential for the prosodic differentiation of oral text varieties? The study investigates this question on the basis of a corpus of French and Italian recordings of the text genres fairy-tale (fiaba) and radio news (giornale radio, radiojournal). After an overview of previous research, a detailed empirical survey identifies prosodic patterns specific to these text genres and tests them by means of a perception experiment. The results are discussed in a more general theoretical context of language and text perception.