Tonal structure and pitch targets in Italian focus constituents

This work investigates the tonal structure of the focal accent in narrow focus statements of Neapolitan Italian. The formal properties of this accent lend themselves to two competing analyses. Specifically, this accent could equally be described as a HL accentual fall or as a LH rise. The two analyses were evaluated on the basis of a set of utterances containing focus constituents with varying number of words. Long narrow focus constituents present in fact a medial F0 minimum that appears to be an actual tonal target. Such a target might be part of either a HL or of a LH accent. Tonal as well as timing evidence appear to lend support to the LH hypothesis. An important consequence is that the final fall of statement focus constituents must be analyzed as a tonal event that is separate from the nuclear pitch accent and is analogous to the question final fall

Tonal structure and pitch targets in Italian focus constituents

This work investigates the tonal structure of the focal accent in narrow focus statements of Neapolitan Italian. The formal properties of this accent lend themselves to two competing analyses. Specifically, this accent could equally be described as a HL accentual fall or as a LH rise. The two analyses were evaluated on the basis of a set of utterances containing focus constituents with varying number of words. Long narrow focus constituents present in fact a medial F0 minimum that appears to be an actual tonal target. Such a target might be part of either a HL or of a LH accent. Tonal as well as timing evidence appear to lend support to the LH hypothesis. An important consequence is that the final fall of statement focus constituents must be analyzed as a tonal event that is separate from the nuclear pitch accent and is analogous to the question final fall.Aquest article investiga l'estructura tonal de l'accent focal de les oracions declaratives amb focus estret en italià de Nàpols. Les propietats formals de l'accent focal es podrien en principi analitzar de dues maneres possibles, bé com un accent tonal HL de tipus descendent o bé com un accent tonal LH de tipus ascendent. Les dues possibles anàlisis són avaluades en funció del comportament de l'accent tonal en constituents que contenen un nombre variable de mots. Els constituents focalitzats presenten una vall d'F0 que es comporta com un clar objectiu entonatiu. Aquest punt d'inflexió podria ser part també d'un accent HL o LH. Indicis tonals i temporals donen suport a la hipòtesi que es tracta d'un accent tonal ascendent. D'aquesta anàlisi se'n deriva el fet que el moviment tonal descendent final de les oracions declaratives s'ha d'analitzar com un gest tonal diferent de l'accent nuclear i que aquest es comporta de forma anàloga al to de frontera ascendent final de les oracions interrogatives

Effects of tonal alignment on lexical identification in Italian

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of tonal alignment in Italian variety spoken in Naples. We focused on the effects of intonation in the perception of minimal pairs contrasting in consonant duration. Spectrographic analyses show that the timing of pitch accent varies with the syllable structure (see also [1]). In open syllable (CV), the pitch peak is realized within the stressed vowel, while in the closed syllable (CVC) the peak is reached at the end of the accented syllable, associated with the last consonant. In order to analyze these effects, series of words contrasting in consonant duration and inserted in the same segmental environment were produced by a native speaker. Two kinds of manipulation were performed. First, we modified the length of the stressed vowel and the following consonant in five steps; then, the timing of the pitch peak was modified in four steps, too. Finally, a set of resynthesized stimuli was created by the combination of all the different steps of duration and pitch: this set constituted our basis for the perception experiments. We asked thirteen Neapolitan people to listen to the stimuli, and to identify them with either one word or the other of each pair. Our results show that manipulation of intonation was significant for the stimuli coming from the CVC words. That is, a garden path effect (or: a shift in responses) related to the timing of the pitch peak was found. These results lend support to the hypothesis that the listeners use temporal alignment for the perception of segmental identity and that the contribution of intonation both in production and in perception is a fundamental source of linguistic information

Effects of tonal alignment on lexical identification in Italian

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of tonal alignment in Italian variety spoken in Naples. We focused on the effects of intonation in the perception of minimal pairs contrasting in consonant duration. Spectrographic analyses show that the timing of pitch accent varies with the syllable structure (see also [1]). In open syllable (CV), the pitch peak is realized within the stressed vowel, while in the closed syllable (CVC) the peak is reached at the end of the accented syllable, associated with the last consonant. In order to analyze these effects, series of words contrasting in consonant duration and inserted in the same segmental environment were produced by a native speaker. Two kinds of manipulation were performed. First, we modified the length of the stressed vowel and the following consonant in five steps; then, the timing of the pitch peak was modified in four steps, too. Finally, a set of resynthesized stimuli was created by the combination of all the different steps of duration and pitch: this set constituted our basis for the perception experiments. We asked thirteen Neapolitan people to listen to the stimuli, and to identify them with either one word or the other of each pair. Our results show that manipulation of intonation was significant for the stimuli coming from the CVC words. That is, a garden path effect (or: a shift in responses) related to the timing of the pitch peak was found. These results lend support to the hypothesis that the listeners use temporal alignment for the perception of segmental identity and that the contribution of intonation both in production and in perception is a fundamental source of linguistic information

Effects of syllable structure on intonation identification in Neapolitan Italian

International audienceIn Neapolitan Italian, nuclear rises are later in yes/no questions (L*+H) than in narrow focus statements (L+H*). Also, the H target is later in closed syllable items than in open syllable ones. In three identification tasks, we found that, when stimuli are ambiguous between questions and statements, listeners exploit the information on the precise alignment within the syllable to identify sentence type. This effect depends on durational constraints, i.e., the perceptual location of the H target is calculated relative to the actual duration of the vowel. Our results suggest that phonetic variability plays a role in shaping intonational categories and support models in which segmental and prosodic information are processed in a parallel fashion

Pitch accent alignment in Romance: primary and secondary associations with metrical structure

International audienceThe article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for such facts within the AM model, the article develops the notion of 'phonological anchoring' as an extension of the concept of secondary association originally proposed by Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988), and later adopted by Grice (1995), Grice, Ladd & Arvaniti (2000) and others to explain the behavior of edge tones. The Romance data represent evidence that not only peripheral edge tones seek secondary associations. We claim that the phonological representation of pitch accents should include two independent mechanisms to encode alignment properties with metrical structure: (1) encoding of the primary phonological association (or affiliation) between the tone and its tone-bearing unit; and (2), for some specific cases, encoding of the secondary phonological anchoring of tones to prosodic edges (moras, syllables and prosodic words). The Romance data described in the article provide crucial evidence of mora-edge, syllable-edge, and word-edge H tonal associations

Fine phonetic detail and intonational meaning

International audienceThe development of theories about form-function relations in intonation should be informed by a better understanding of the dependencies that hold among different phonetic parameters. Fine phonetic detail encodes both linguistically structured meaning and paralinguistic meaning. <BR /

Prosodic and informational aspects of polar questions in Neapolitan Italian

In this paper the relation between prosodic form and meaning is investigated in a sample of polar questions in Neapolitan Italian, taken from four Map Task dialogues. The sample is analyzed from both the informational and the prosodic point of view. The analysis of the information structure led to the constitution of four groups of questions which are distinguished by their function or by the degree of accessibility of the referents they contain. The groups were then put in relation to the conversational Map Task moves, and to the results of the prosodic analysis. The results of this analysis show that polar questions in Neapolitan Italian have a common prosodic pattern. Their different functions, i.e. confirmation-seeking and information-seeking, are expressed with a variety of means that, together with the information provided by the context, concur to orient the interpretation

Alignment perception of high intonational plateaux in Italian and German

International audienceThis paper addresses the issue of tonal perception as it relates to special configurations, i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) plateaux. We here review a series of perceptual experiments in two different languages, Italian (Naples and Pisa variety) and German. A subset of the auditory stimuli employed in these studies contained a high F0 plateau, which had to be either identified for a specific tonal category or matched to a previous context. The results show a tendency, for all languages, to match a pitch accent category having a late H peak target to plateau stimuli, which might be due to a universal auditory integration mechanism. This has consequences for intonation models, since the relationship between dynamic characteristics of accentual contours and tonal target location is complex and not always immediately identifiable with turning points

Are tones aligned with articulatory events? Evidence from Italian and French

International audienceTonal alignment work has suggested that the temporal location of tonal targets relative to segmental "anchors" might be governed by principles of synchrony and stability (Arvaniti et al 1998, Ladd et al. 1999, inter alia). However, a number of discrepancies have emerged in the cross-linguistic study of alignment. For instance, despite some regularities in the alignment of L targets (Caspers and van Heuven 1993; Prieto et al. 1995), the alignment of H targets appears to be quite controversial. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to find definite segmental landmarks to which such targets might be aligned. Also, most of the alignment proposals so far inherently assume that if some anchors for tonal alignment do exist they must be acoustic in nature. A plausible alternative would be to assume that such anchors are primarily articulatory, which would explain why in some cases the underlying regularities would be masked. Hence, we adopt a new experimental paradigm for alignment research in which articulatory measures are performed simultaneously with acoustic measures. In order to test the constant alignment hypothesis, a preliminary study (D'Imperio et al. 2003) was conducted in which various latency measures, both acoustically and articulatorily based, were analyzed. Specifically, the kinematics of OPTOTRAK markers attached to the speaker's upper and lower lip was tracked over time during the production of the corpus sentences. The melodic target considered is the H tone of LH nuclear rises in Neapolitan Italian. In this variety, yes/no question LH rises are systematically later than (narrow focus) statement LH rises (D'Imperio 2000, 2001, 2002; D'Imperio and House 1997). In order to test the hypothesis of constant anchoring of H targets, the materials were produced with two different rates of speech, i.e. normal and fast. Summarizing the results, H targets of nuclear rises in Neapolitan statements and questions appear to be more closely phased with the articulatory dimension of between-lip distance than with two of the most commonly employed acoustic segmental landmarks for tonal alignment (i.e., onset and offset of stressed vowel). Statement H tones are phased with maximum between-lip distance within the stressed syllable. Note that this location does not correspond to any identifiable segmental boundary, acoustic event or phonological unit, and does not overlap with RMS peak amplitude. In fact, RMS peaks were generally much earlier than articulatory peaks, hence further away from H peaks. This calls for the collection and analysis of more articulatory data (especially jaw and tongue movements) to shed light on tonal alignment issues.In a second study, a French corpus was collected on the basis of the alignment contrast found by Welby (2003, in press). Welby's results show that listeners use the alignment of the initial rise (LHi) in French Accentual Phrases as a cue to speech segmentation. Specifically, listeners exploit the presence of an early rise to demarcate the beginning of a content word. In the present study, a corpus was built with a set of utterances displaying this specific alignment contrast. The kinematics of 10 pellets (8 on the face and tongue, 2 references) was tracked over time using an electromagnetometer (EMA, Carstens). The phasing of several articulatory events relative to the L and H part of the early rise were examined. The preliminary results seem to point to some kind of fine alignment specification for the L and H target. Specifically, we hypothesize that tonal target commands of Neapolitan as well as French rises are phased with commands of the supralaryngeal articulator involved to produce the segments to which the tone is associated. Regarding the word segmentation issue for French, it is important to study alignment in a diachronic perspective since we know of case of speech segmentation errors that can lead to lexical reinterpretation and change (l'abondance "abundance" > la bondance, from Welby 2003). We also take these results to suggest that not all rises align in the same way with the associated syllable. Though the role of articulatory constraints is important, the exact phasing properties of prosodic events are language-specific. Since prosody has recently become the realm of investigation of the Task Dynamics program (Byrd and Saltzman 2003), our alignment work will be cast under such a perspective