Tonal alignment, scaling and slope in Italian question and statement tunes

Autorisation No.1359 : TIPA est la revue du Laboratoire Parole et LangageUnlike in languages such as English and Standard Italian, the Italian spoken in Naples shares with other Southern varieties the use of a very similar rising-falling (LHL) tune for both yes/no questions and narrow focus statements (D'Imperio, 2001; Grice et al., to appear). However, it has been claimed that the temporal alignment of the accent peak is later in the pitch accent of yes/no questions (L*+H) than in that of statements (L+H*) and that this alignment difference is employed by native speakers to perceptually identify the two tunes (D'Imperio and House, 1997). This study acoustically tested the hypothesis that all three tonal targets of the rise-fall are timed and scaled differently in questions and statements. Moreover, slope differences for both rise and fall were also tested by employing logistic regression modeling. Two speakers of Neapolitan Italian produced utterances whose target words differed in question/statement modality, syllable structure and segmental environment. The results show that all three targets within the rise-fall are timed later in questions than in statements. By contrast, no systematic difference was found for the slope of the rise nor for the slope of the fall. The exact contribution of F0 height to signaling the contrast could not be determined, though. In fact, while one speaker marked the difference by producing higher peaks for statements, the other did not produce any difference.Contrairement à certaines langues comme l'anglais et l'italien standard, l'italien parlé à Naples partage avec d'autres variétés du Sud de l'Italie un patron mélodique ascendant/descendant (LHL) très similaire pour les questions oui/non et pour les affirmations à focalisation étroite (D'Imperio, 2001 ; Grice et al., à paraître). Néanmoins, il a été proposé que les pics d'accent mélodique des questions oui/non (L*+H) sont alignés temporellement plus tard que ceux des affirmations (L+H*) et que cette différence d'alignement est employée par les auditeurs de langue maternelle napolitaine pour identifier perceptuellement les deux modalités (D'Imperio and House, 1997). Cette étude teste au niveau acoustique l'hypothèse que les trois cibles tonales de la montée/descente sont alignées temporellement différemment et sont produites sur des échelles différentes pour les questions et les affirmations. De plus, les différences de pente des montées et des descentes ont aussi été analysées grâce à un modèle de régression logistique. Deux locuteurs napolitains ont produit des phrases dont les mots cibles, la structure syllabique et l'environnement segmental différaient pour la modalité question et la modalité affirmation. Les résultats montrent que les trois cibles dans les montées/descentes sont alignées plus tard pour les questions que pour les affirmations. Par contre, aucune différence systématique n'a été mise en évidence pour les pentes des montées ou pour les pentes des descentes. La contribution exacte de la hauteur de la F0 au contraste question/affirmation n'a pu être déterminée. En effet, alors qu'un locuteur marquait le contraste en produisant des pics plus élevés pour les affirmations, l'autre locuteur n'a produit aucune différence significative entre les deux modalités

Acoustic-perceptual Correlates of Sentence Prominence in Italian

Research on the acoustic correlates of perceived accentual prominence has generally focused on fundamental frequency (F0) alone, while few studies have attempted to shed light on how other parameters, such as duration and intensity, might interact with F0. A previous study on Italian lexical stress perception shows that duration has a major role. The present work reports on results of an experiment using synthetic speech to test which aspects of the signal, among F0, duration and intensity, are more influential in the perception of prominence structure at the sentence level and whether there are differences between questions and statements. To this end, a series of hybrid LPC-resynthesized stimuli were presented to 22 Italian listeners for forced-choice judgments. The results suggest a bigger impact of the hybridization on interrogative utterances

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

Phonetic Detail and the Role of Exposure in Dialect Imitation

International audienceSpeakers are able to adjust their prosodic patterns to approximate those of a different dialect, at least when the dialects involved are phonologically similar [6, 7]. Our study explores imitation across two dialects of English (Singaporean and American) whose prosodic systems are phonologically very distinct. Singaporean speakers were recorded both in their native dialect and while attempting to imitate sentences produced by an American English speaker. Our results show that in spite of the structural differences, speakers of Singapore English are able to rapidly adapt and shift from an edge-based system to an accentual system within the time of the experiment, as well as to finely tune the phonetic detail of their intonation patterns in a way that closely tracked that of the American English model speaker. We further show that the degree of variability in successfully reproducing the target values is dependent on amount of exposure to the non-native dialect

Is there an Intermediate Phrase in French?

The existence of an intermediate level of phrasing (ip) has been shown for several Germanic as well as Romance languages. There is some evidence for this intermediate level of phrasing in French even if its status is still controversial. Our assumption is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level (ip) in French is not simply linked to a specific focus or marked syntactic structure. Our hypothesis is that an ip boundary might appear within a broad focus utterance when the syntactic structure allows it. In this study we examined durational cues in a read speech corpus at normal and fast rates in which the target syllable was either adjacent to a prosodic boundary or word-internal. In line with our predictions, the results show that preboundary syllable length increases with prosodic boundary strength, in that longer syllables were masured at IP boundaries, and an intermediate degree of lengthening was found at ip boundaries. Our results suggest that prosodic cues are reinforced when there is an alignment between prosodic and syntactic boundaries and support the existence of an intermediate prosodic level in French

Focus, phrase length, and the distribution of phrase-initial rises in French

International audienceThis study addresses the relationship between information structure and intonation in French. More specifically, it tests whether phrase-initial rises (LHi) are associated with the left edge of contrastively focused constituents in wh-interrogatives. Since LHi distribution has also been correlated with length, the study further examines the relative contribution of constraints operating at two distinct levels: information structure and phonological structure. The results show that each set of constraints makes an independent contribution to the occurrence of LHi, but with no interaction. In other words, LHi is more likely to occur at the left edge of a contrastive focus domain, and more likely to occur in longer phrases, though phrase length does not influence the extent to which LHi marks focus. The findings of this study represent the first quantitative assessment of focus realization in French in a non-corrective context, and establish a previously undocumented link between LHi and discourse-level meaning

Embedded register levels and prosodic phrasing in French

International audienceWithin the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation, there is only weak evidence for the existence of the intermediate phrase (ip) for French. Our proposal is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level is not merely linked to a specific focus or marked syntactic structure, while predicting that an alignment constraint (ALING-XP,R; ip,R) conspires to place an ip boundary at the right edge of a maximal projection, such as at an NP/VP boundary, when the maximal projection can be parsed into at least two accentual phrases. Alos, an ip boundary appears to be signaled by prosodic cues that are stronger than the ones associated to (ip-internal) AP boundaries. The alignment between major syntactic constituents and prosodic structure appears to be signaled by a H- tone aligned at the right edge of the ip (blocking recursive downstep of ip-internal LH* rises) as well as preboundary lengthening. Finally, partial reset of the first LH* following the ip boundary is taken as evidence for an internal structuring of the Intonation Phrase

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

High peaks versus high plateaux in the identification of two pitch accents in Pisa Italian

International audienceThe role of pitch pattern shape and perceptual target location is investigated here by means of an identification test involving two pitch accent categories in Pisa Italian. The perception test concerned the pitch accents used in contrastive and utterance-initial broad focus and was performed by asking subjects to identify two continua composed of peak and plateau stimuli whose alignment and scaling characteristics were manipulated. In line with previous findings, results show that alignment and scaling both play a role in accent identification and that pitch shape affects subject perception. In particular, plateau stimuli are perceived as late peak stimuli having the same fundamental frequency height or else they are perceived as early peak stimuli realized at a higher frequency