Effects of syllable structure on intonation identification in Neapolitan Italian

Abstract

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