De Iacovo, Valentina

Mairano, Paolo

English

DE IACOVO, Valentina

Institutional Research Information System University of Turin

Prosodic variation and perceptive distinctness?An experiment with some dialectal varieties of ItalyValentina De Iacovo1, Paolo Mairano21University of Turin, Italy2University of Turin, Italyv.deiacovo@gmail.com, paolo.mairano@unito.itAbstractProsody  represents  a  fundamental  cue  in  the  geographicalidentification of many Italian dialectal varieties. Especially inthe  interrogative  modality,  prosody  can  vary  according  tospecific areas. Previous studies, based on the identification ofspecific  prosodic  functions,  confirmed the  fundamental  roleplayed  by  prosodic  cues  alone.  But  what  happens  whenprosodic  variations  are  not  so  obvious?  Starting  from  fivedialectal  varieties spoken in Italy,  we tested whether detailscharacterising  dialectal  varieties  are  perceptivelydistinguishable.  We  devised  an  auditory  discrimination  taskwith delexicalized stimuli reproducing prosodic cues only. Theresults show that participants are able to discriminate dialectsirrespective of the amount of prosodic distance.Index Terms:  dialectal  varieties,  prosodic  cues,  perception,dialectology, Italian dialects.1. Introduction1.1. Perceptive tests and dialectal identificationProsodic  variation  represents  an  asset  in  many  dialectalvarieties.  Studies  [1]  and  [2]  conducted  on  the  regionalvarieties of Italy, showed, by means of different approaches,the  existence  of  a  great  prosodic  variability  related  to  aspecific dialectal area. For some varieties, nevertheless, pitch,duration and rhythm play a similar role, with the result that theprosodic distinction is less sharp.Previous studies confirmed that prosodic cues are relevant inidentifying questions and statements [3],  different languages[4],  regional  varieties  [5],  but  also  that  there  is  a  certainmargin within which changes can be made without any effecton perception [6].Working on dialectal varieties spoken in Italy, our aim is tocompare intonation patterns and show which prosodic featurescontribute  to  make  a  specific  variety  sound  different  fromanother one. Since instrumental analysis of acoustic featuresshows a small amount of variation for some varieties, our aimis to test if these changes are perceptively relevant or not.2. Method2.1. StimuliThe  test  consisted  in  a  discrimination  task  on  the  basis  ofauditory stimuli. For each trial, participants listened to a pairof  synthesized  stimuli.  Stimuli  were  as  delexicalized  re-synthesis  starting  from  3  questions,  each  produced  in  5different  dialectal  varieties  of  Italy.  For  each  trial,  theparticipant had to choose if the two stimuli (i.e. re-synthesizedquestions) were asked by people speaking the same dialectalvariety.  As  we  already  mentioned,  among  the  varietiespreviously analysed,  some questions presented a very smallvariation in the final part (corresponding to the verb and theobject), so we wanted to test whether these differences wereperceptively relevant. We therefore chose 5 dialectal varieties(Roma, Frosinone, Prato, Taranto and Pollina), where the firstthree (Prato, Roma and Frosinone) and the last two (Tarantoand Pollina) presented a very similar pattern (see fig. 1). Also,we wanted to test if the position of the stress was relevant toidentify a certain variety; so we chose three different neutralquestions, always composed of a bisyllabic verb and an object.The object was composed by an article and a trisyllabic word,with  three  different  stress  pattern:  oxytone  (code  oxy),paroxytone (code par), proparoxytone (code pro). Figure 1: Intonation curves of the varieties of Roma,Frosinone and Prato (left column), Taranto and Pollina(righ column).The last trisyllabic word is oxytone(first row), paroxytone (second row) andproparoxytone (third row).Since the original questions had been produced by 5 differentspeakers belonging to the 5 different varieties analyzed,  wenormalised only the pitch values of the 15 questions using aMatLab  script  in  order  to  compensate  differences  in  pitchmean across speakers.  Samples  were therefore delexicalisedand re-synthesised to preserve the duration, the relative pitchchanges and the intensity of the original WAV files: in short,they reproduced only the prosodic information. As we alreadymentioned, we only considered the last part of the sentences,corresponding to the verb and the object: this choice was madein the effort  to minimize other potential  differences such asthematisations/rhematisations;  this  allowed  participants  toconcentrate  exclusively  on  a  precise  part  of  the  question,presenting the variation we wanted to test.  In summary, the9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 201813-16 June 2018, Poznań, Poland975 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-197test  included  5  varieties  (Roma,  Frosinone,  Prato,  Taranto,Pollina, respectively coded Rm,  Fr,  Pr,  Ta,  Po) and, for eachof these, 3 stress patterns, for a total of 15 possibilities. 2.2. Format of the testFor each trial, stimuli were matched according to four possiblecombinations:1. same variety,  same typology (15 combinations) →for example, TaparTapar;2. same variety,  different typology (30 combinations)→ for example, FrproFrpar;3. different variety,  same typology (60 combinations)→ for example, RmparPrpar;4. different  variety,  different  typology  (120combinations) → for example, TaproPopar.In order to have a balanced amount of stimuli,  we doubledtrials for cases 1 and 2, for a total of 90 stimuli. Conversely,we reduced the number of trials for case 4 by employing onlythe combinations with par/pro, plus 10 trials, for a total of 30trials. Each trial consisted of two stimuli spaced out by a pauseof  600  ms,  for  a  total  of  180  trials.  Before  the  test,  eachparticipant performed a training session including 4 trials thatwere  excluded  from  the  analysis.  The  results  of  eachparticipant were therefore stored in a csv file generated by theapplication at the end of each session.2.3. Set up of the testThe test has been completed through an application conceivedfor Apple iPad. Before starting the test, the participants filled ashort  questionnaire  with personal  data  (sex,  age,  education)and linguistic knowledge (their mother-tongue, whether theyand their parents speak a dialect, how many foreign languagesand  which  proficiency  level  they  have.  Most  of  theparticipants were students. They did not receive any monetarycompensation for taking the test,  but they received a partialcredit for the exam in General Linguistics. The tests took placein the Laboratory of Experimental Phonetics “Arturo Genre”of Turin. Before starting the test,  the first author personallyexplained how the test was conceived and they were invited toask any questions after reading the instructions. The listenerssat in a testing sound-proof booth in front of an iPad Mini 4equipped with Sennheiser HD451 headphones; after readingthe instructions, they started a training session with 4 trials andthen proceeded to the real test session.On each trial, they firstly heard the two synthetic stimuli andthen pressed a key to indicate if the stimuli heard belonged tothe same (yes) or not (no). The interface used was extremelysimple, consisting exclusively of the yes and no buttons (fig.)so that participants only had to press the button correspondingto their answer and they were immediately put forward to thenext audio sample. The stimuli were presented randomly andthe  participants  could  only  hear  each  stimulus  once  beforemaking their response without any possibility to go back andcorrect  the  answer.  The  participants  did  not  receive  anyfeedback about their responses, but at the end of the test theycould ask for their ‘score’ and could give us their impressionsabout the test. At that time, we provided more detail about theresearch that we carried out.During  the  test,  there  were  two break  times  (one every 60stimuli) to give the participants the time to pause and continuethe test when they wanted. At the end of the test, a new screenappeared  and,  finally,  the  application  created  a  CSV  filecontaining the stimulus order, the correctness of the answer,the code stimulus, the response given, the reaction time, thename  of  the  test,  the  code  to  identify  the  accuracy  of  theanswer, the number associated to the stimulus and the replaynumber.2.4. ParticipantsThe experiment has been submitted to 20 students (10 males,10 females). All participants were native Italian speakers, agedbetween 23 and 30. The majority claimed to have no activecompetence of any dialectal variety, while all but two of themclaimed to have passive competence of at least one dialectalvariety of Italy.3. Results3.1 Statistical analysisThe data  were  analysed  via  a  logistic  mixed-effects  model(responses) and a linear mixed-effects model (response time).The  independent  variables  were  accuracy  of  responses  andresponse time. Both models included 2 fixed effects: dialectsimilarity (same dialect vs similar dialect vs different dialect)and  stress  pattern  (same  structure  vs  different  structure).‘Same dialect’ refers to trials where stimulus 1 and 2 are re-synthesised  questions  in  the  same  dialect;  ‘similar  dialect’refers  to  trials  where  stimuli  1  and  2  are  re-synthesisedquestions in dialects with similar pitch contours’ (e.g. Romeand  Frosinone);  ‘different  dialect’ refers  to  trials  in  whichstimuli  1  and  2  come  from  dialects  with  different  pitchcontours (e.g. Rome and Taranto). Similarly, ‘same structure’refers to trials in which stimuli 1 and 2 had the same stresspattern on the last word, whereas ‘different structure’ refers totrials in which stimuli 1 and 2 had different stress patterns onthe last word (e.g. oxytone vs paroxytone). The models alsoinclude  2  random  effects,  namely  participant  and  stimuluspair. The effects of the independent variables were estimatedwith  ANOVA  table  of  type  III  with  Satterthwaiteapproximation  for  degress  of  freedom,  as  provided  by  thelmerTest package in R [12].3.2 Accuracy of responsesResponses given by participants are plotted in fig. 2 by dialectsimilarity (x axis) and stress pattern (colour).  We tested thestatistical  significance  of  these  two  variables  via  a  logisticmixed-effects model with dialect similarity and stress patternas fixed effect, participant and stimuli as random effects. Theoutput tells us that the main effects of both dialect similarityand stress pattern are highly significant (p < .001 for both).However,  post-hoc  comparisons  with  Bonferroni  correctionreveal that statistical differences exist only between responsesfor  same  dialect  vs  different  dialect  (p  <  .001)  and  samedialect vs similar dialect p < .001), but not between responsesfor different vs similar dialect (p = .52). This means that, onthe one hand, trials in which the two stimuli were re-synthesesof  the  same  dialect  were  recognized  as  such,  with  higherratings than trials containing similar or different dialects. Onthe other hand,  no significance difference occurred betweentrials  containing  dialects  with  similar  vs  different  pitch976contours,  thereby suggesting  that  small  prosodic  details  aresufficient to trigger perceptual distinction.Figure 2: Participant responses by dialect similarityand stress pattern3.3 Response timeResponse  time are  plotted  in  fig.  3  by dialect  similarity  (xaxis) and stress pattern (colour). Outliers beyond the .05 and .95 percentiles have been discarded from the charts and fromthe analysis. Figure 3: Response times by dialect similarity andstress patternWe tested the statistical significance of these two variables viaa linear mixed-effects model with dialect similarity and stresspattern  as  fixed  effect,  participant  and  stimuli  as  randomeffects. We found significant main effects for dialect similarity(p < .001) and stress pattern (p < .001). However, post-hocpairwise  comparisons  with Bonferroni  correction show thatthe  only  condition  responsible  for  statistical  significance  is‘same dialect  and same stress  pattern’ (p < .001).  In  otherwords,  response  times  for  this  condition  are  significantlydistinct from response times for all other conditions; but allother conditions do not differ significantly from one another(all p = .27 or higher). This is also visible in the chart above,where  the  marker  for  ‘same  dialect’ and  ‘same  structure’clearly  indicates  lower  response  times  than  the  rest.  Thissuggests  that  participants  found  it  easier  to  recognize  re-synthesized stimuli from the same dialect and with the samestress  pattern  than  any  other  pair  of  stimuli.  Again,  nostatistical difference was found between stimuli belonging todialects  with  similar  vs  different  pitch  contours,  althoughresponse  times  do  seem to  be  descriptively  higher  for  thelatter. This leads us to hypothesize that dialects with similarpitch  contours  were  potentially  more  problematic  todistinguish,  and  this  caused  slightly  longer  response  times,although our current data do not reach statistical significance.4. Discussion and conclusionResults have shown the main effects of dialect similarity andstress pattern. When the dialectal variety and the stress patternare both the same, there is a maximum percentage of accuracy;conversely,  when  the  dialectal  variety  is  the  same  but  thestress pattern changes, accuracy decreases to less than 40%.Results  are  comparable  when two similar  dialectal  varietiesare presented with the same structure: the ability to distinguishtwo similar varieties is lower and this is also reflected by theresponse  time,  although  results  do  not  reach  statisticalsignificance in this case. The most relevant finding is the factthat  the  discrimination  of  dialects  presenting  similar  pitchcontours does not seem to differ from the discrimination ofdialects presenting very distinct pitch contours. This suggestthat  small  prosodic  details  can  be  sufficient  to  perceptivediscrimination of dialectal variants.This  experiment  represents  only  a  starting  point  for  theinvestigation of the prosodic perception of dialectal varieties.Further  tests  will  be  conducted in  the future,  considering agreater  amount  of  varieties  and a  more consistent  group ofparticipants.5. AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank John Hajek and Greg Loakesfor the chance they gave us to use the iPad application andAntonio Romano for the support given at the LFSAG of Turin.We are also grateful to all the participants.6. References[1] L.  Canepari,  “L'intonazione.  Linguistica  e  paralinguistica.”,Napoli: Liguori, 1985.[2] R. Endo, & P.M. Bertinetto, “Aspetti dell’intonazione in alcunevarietà di italiano”, Fonetica e fonologia degli stili dell’italianoparlato. Atti delle VII giornate di studio del Gruppo di foneticasperimentale (AIA), pp. 27-49, 1997.[3] F. Ferrero, “Studio preliminare sulla classificazione percettiva dicontorni  intonativi  sintetici  come  interrogativi/noninterrogativi”, Atti del Convegno della Società di Ling. Italiana,pp. 81-93, 1976.[4] J.J.  Ohala,  &  J.B.  Gilbert,  “Listeners'  ability  to  identifylanguages  by  their  prosody”,  Problèmes  de  prosodie,  Vol.  II:Experimentations, modèles et fonctions, pp.123-131, 1981.[5] F. Schaeffler, & R. Summers, “Recognizing German Dialects byprosodic  features  alone,”  Proceedings  of  the  14th ICPhS,  pp.2311-2314, 1999.[6] E.  Garding, & A.S. Abramson,  “A study of the perception ofsome American English intonation contours”, Studia Linguistica,vol.19, 1965.[7] M.  Contini,  J.-P.  Lai,  A.  Romano,  S.  Roullet,  L.  de  CastroMoutinho, R.L. Coimbra, U. Pereira Bendiha, & S. Secca Ruivo,“Un projet  d'atlas  multimédia  prosodique  de  l'espace  roman”,Proceedings  of  the  International  Conference  Speech  Prosody2002, pp. 227-230, 2002.[8] L. Canepari, “Italiano standard e pronuncia regionale.”, Padova,CLEUP, 1983.[9] P.  Lieberman,  “On  the  Acoustic  Basis  of  the  Perception  ofIntonation by Linguists”, WORD, 21:1, 40-54, 1965.[10] W.  Majewski,  &  R.  Blasdell,  “Influence  of  fundamentalfrequency cues on the perception of some synthetic intonation977contours.”,  The Journal  of  the  Acoustical  Society  of  America,vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 450-457, 1969.[11] P. Delattre, “Les dix intonations de base du français”, The frenchreview, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 1-14, 1966.[12] A.  Kuznetsova,  P.B.  Brockhoff,  &  R.H.B.  Christensen,“lmerTest  Package:  Tests  in  Linear  Mixed  Effects  Models”,Journal of Statistical Software, 82 (13), 1-26, 2017.978

Prosodic variation and perceptive distinctness? An experiment with some dialectal varieties of Italy.

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Prosodic variation and perceptive distinctness? An experiment with some dialectal varieties of Italy.

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