An analysis of Pisa Italian speech material revealed the existence of specific pitch accents associated with linguistic functions. Two of these accents are investigated in this paper: a rising accent found in continuation contours, narrow focus and elliptic questions, and a rising‐falling accent found in contrastive focus and questions with a strong flavour of disbelief. Two tests were performed both to verify the distinction of the two accents and to try to tease apart the contribution of their main phonetic characteristics to their distinction: a categorical perception test and an imitation test. The results show that the two pitch accents are not perceived through categorical perception, although, in the imitation task, subjects appear to produce two different patterns, showing characteristics consistent with the pitch accents investigated. This suggests that the Categorical Perception paradigm may be not apt to be extensively used for intonation, giving results that appear to be too detached from the actual use of intonation observed in production data.
From production to perception and back: An analysis of two pitch accents
GILI FIVELA, BARBARA
2009-01-01
Abstract
An analysis of Pisa Italian speech material revealed the existence of specific pitch accents associated with linguistic functions. Two of these accents are investigated in this paper: a rising accent found in continuation contours, narrow focus and elliptic questions, and a rising‐falling accent found in contrastive focus and questions with a strong flavour of disbelief. Two tests were performed both to verify the distinction of the two accents and to try to tease apart the contribution of their main phonetic characteristics to their distinction: a categorical perception test and an imitation test. The results show that the two pitch accents are not perceived through categorical perception, although, in the imitation task, subjects appear to produce two different patterns, showing characteristics consistent with the pitch accents investigated. This suggests that the Categorical Perception paradigm may be not apt to be extensively used for intonation, giving results that appear to be too detached from the actual use of intonation observed in production data.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
