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The Production and Perception of Subject Focus Prosody in L2 Spanish
New information can be introduced in discourse through different strategies, including syntactic and prosodic ones. This project provides an account of the syntactic and intonational strategies used for focus-marking in Peninsular Spanish, Mainstream American English and L2 Spanish using parallel experimental designs and a unitary method of analysis within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework for the study of intonation. It provides a comprehensive description of specific phonological categories and their phonetic implementation not only in monolingual speech, but also as they develop in the L2 grammar of Spanish learners with different experiences with the target language, following the premises of the L2 Intonation Learning Theory (LILt). Additionally, the perception of L2 intonation by native speakers was examined using an acceptability judgment task. Findings show that the intonational grammars of Spanish learners develop despite the lack of formal instruction, which allows them to produce native-like contours in certain contexts even if they have not been immersed in the target language for an extended period of time. This development is, nonetheless, constrained by different linguistic (i.e. transfer, universal patterns) and individual factors (i.e. onset of acquisition, proficiency). Furthermore, results from the acceptability judgment task suggest that learners’ communicative intentions are correctly identified by native speakers when they use target-like contours, but they are misinterpreted when they fail to produce a target-like contour. This study contributes to the understanding of the role of transfer, linguistic interdependencies and interlanguage representations in the development of intonational grammars. Moreover, it shows that the acquisition of intonation is not so different from the L2 acquisition of morpho-syntax or segmental phonology and may be examined through similar approaches, including feature-based ones
Production, perception and online processing of prominence in the post-focal domain
This dissertation presents a fundamentally new and in-depth investigation of the distribution of prominence in different focal structures in two varieties of Italian (the one spoken in Udine and the one spoken in Bari), by means of the implementation of a categorical analysis with the continuous prosodic parameters related to F0 and periodic energy. Results provide evidence of the fact that prominence in these varieties of Italian is conveyed by both a categorical three-way distinction and a gradual modulation: absence or presence of pitch movement in the distinction between background (post-focal position) and the focal conditions, and a gradual modification of energy and duration. The degree of prominence of words occurring in different focal structures was also investigated in perception. The reportedly different distribution of prominence found in questions for the variety of Italian spoken in Bari is shown to have an influence in the degree of perceived prominence. This influence is found in the comparison between prominence’s ratings of Bari and Udine native speakers, as well as of Bari native speakers and German native speakers, with Italian as L2. Furthermore, the present dissertation tests the real-time processing of the pitch excursion registered in the post-focal region of questions in the Bari variety. Findings confirmed that the fine-grained changes in prominence are processed in real time. Moreover, results indicate that top-down expectations play a crucial role in modulating general cognitive processes. Overall, this thesis supports the view of prosodic prominence as characterised by a bundle of cues, probabilistically distributed in the listener’s perceptual space, which form top-down expectations that play a role both in offline perception and in online processing. Signal-based factors also play a role in perception and online processing, but can however be overridden by expectations