Phonetic variation of f 0 range in L1 and L2 : a comparison between Italian, English and Spanish native and non-native speakers

This work was carried out with the purpose of investigating the use of language-specific features of pitch span and level in L2. Different languages were investigated: on the one hand, we analysed productions in L2 Spanish and English, uttered by Italian learners with different proficiency levels; on the other hand, we analysed productions in L2 Italian uttered by Spanish and English speakers. The results show a very heterogeneous situation: to some extent, learners seem to be sensitive to f 0 excursion and modulation of the L2 input they receive; however, these intonational features of Target Language speech: i) are out of non-native speaker’s control, ii) do not affect all the aspects of L2 productions, and iii) present a high degree of inter-speaker variability

Transfer, fossilization and prosodic drift in Foreign Language Learning

This article aims to shed light on the processes governing the development of prosodic competence in Italian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). We have analysed the intonational contours of yes-no questions read by five groups of speakers (A, B, C, E, and P). Groups A, B, and C are learners of EFL at three different levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), who have never spent significant periods of time in English-speaking countries. Group E includes advanced learners who have English language experience in the UK. Group P includes Italian professors of EFL, who represent a sample of speakers with both acquisition experience and high proficiency in English. Our results highlight the total lack of improvement from Group A to C, allowing us to suggest the occurrence of prosodic transfer and drifts. On the contrary, speakers who have acquired the language in natural environments show improvements in their FL prosodic competence, but this is identified only in some of the prosodic cues analysed. The cues for which we did not observe improvements are thought to be more vulnerable to fossilization

Los tópicos oracionales en italiano: análisis del Corpus CHROME

The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guides’ speech. Topical coherence characterizes the communicative strategies that human experts adopt when delivering contents to the visitors of cultural sites. Topical progression, which ensures temporal, spatial, and referential continuity, is frequently expressed by sentence topics as well. The relevant literature generally supports the idea of a topic accent and a rising-falling (or “hat”) contour is described as the most frequent for the unmarked topic in Italian utterance structures, but other realizations are also possible. The hypothesis that we want to test in this work is whether this variability is due to specific factors. Hence, we investigate phonetic realization of sentence topics as a function of syntactic features -structure, function and weight- and textual-pragmatic features -discourse role considering ±aboutness, ±contrastiveness, ±givenness-. Specifically, tonal events, i.e., accents and boundaries, phonetic phrasing, and disfluency phenomena were investigated. Results show that both syntactic and pragmatic factors play a role in the phonetic realization of topics, though they act at different levels. In particular, disfluencies are found to be affected by syntactic weight and givenness, while tonal events seem to depend mainly on the discourse role.El presente estudio se plantea un análisis fonético de los tópicos oracionales en italiano, examinando habla de guías turísticos. La coherencia temática caracteriza las estrategias comunicativas que adoptan los expertos humanos al transmitir contenidos a los visitantes de los sitios culturales. La progresión temática, que garantiza la continuidad temporal, espacial y referencial, se expresa también con frecuencia mediante tópicos oracionales. Por lo tanto, el corpus examinado ofrece la posibilidad de analizar la realización de estas entidades. La bibliografía pertinente apoya, en general, la idea de un acento de tópico e indica un contorno ascendente-descendente como el más frecuente para el tópico no marcado, aunque resultan posibles otras realizaciones. La hipótesis que queremos comprobar en este trabajo es si la variabilidad encontrada en la bibliografía se debe a factores sintácticos y pragmáticos específicos. Por lo tanto, investigamos la realización fonética de los tópicos oracionales en función de características sintácticas -estructura, función y “peso”- y de factores textuales y pragmáticos -rol discursivo considerando los siguientes rasgos: ±aboutness, ±contrastiveness, ±givenness-. En concreto, se investigaron los eventos tonales, es decir, los acentos y las fronteras, el fraseo prosódico y los fenómenos de disfluencia. Los resultados muestran que tanto los factores sintácticos como los pragmáticos desempeñan un papel en la realización fonética de los tópicos oracionales, aunque actúan a diferentes niveles. En particular, las disfluencias se ven afectadas por el peso sintáctico y el estatuto informativo, mientras que los eventos tonales parecen depender principalmente del rol discursivo

An audiovisual corpus of guided tours in cultural sites : data collection protocols in the CHROME project

Creating interfaces for cultural heritage access is considered a fundamental research field because of the many beneficial effects it has on society. In this era of significant advances towards natural interaction with machines and deeper understanding of social communication nuances, it is important to investigate the communicative strategies human experts adopt when delivering contents to the visitors of cultural sites, as this allows the creation of a strong theoretical background for the development of efficient conversational agents. In this work, we present the data collection and annotation protocols adopted for the ongoing creation of the reference material to be used in the Cultural Heritage Resources Orienting Multimodal Experiences (CHROME) project to accomplish that goa

The intonation of closely related varieties : the case of Campania Italian

The present dissertation is concerned with the study of the intonational variation characterizing neighboring varieties of Italian spoken in Campania: in Naples, Salerno and Cilento. Literature on Italian intonation points to a high degree of inter-variety variability and the impossibility to geographically group them according to prosodic features. This thesis aims at addressing the issue by exploring the relationship between close varieties spoken within the same regional borders, namely local varieties of regional Campanian Italian. The choice of the area and the relative locales to be examined comes from a dialectological approach. Campania is characterized by a strong linguistic polymorphism as a result of the presence of different dialectal groups. The selected locales have as substratum “Campanian” (Naples and Salerno) and “Lucanian” (Cilento) dialects. Such dialects are separated in the area south of Salerno by a bundle of, mainly phonetic, isoglosses, running in the area south of Salerno. The study has the goal of identifying the nature and the degree of intra-regional variation and the role of played by the line of dialectal discontinuity in marking diatopic variation across local varieties of Italian. Results show that the three varieties widely share the phonological inventory, the phonological encoding of prosodic types and tonal contrasts under consideration. Main differences concern the phonetic implementation and the frequency of occurrence of tonal events. Such a picture allows to characterize Campania as a transitional area as far as local varieties of regional Italian are concerned, in which diatopic variation and intonational transition show continuity even at the height of the bundle of isoglosses identified for the relative substratum dialects

Lexicalized pauses in Italian

This research explores lexicalized filled pauses in Italian tourist guides’ speech, addressing the existing correlation between their formal, mainly phonetic, features and pragmatic functions. The study reveals that pauses’ F0 contour correlates with their main functions, allowing to distinguish pauses working as controlled focusing devices, from more explicitly unintentional hesitation pauses