Meanings, shades of meanings and prototypes of intonational categories

The paper discusses results of four perception experiments run to figure out, in the first place, if different members of a pitch accent category are equally good in representing the category and its meaning and, in the second place, if one exemplar may work as perceptual magnet, affecting the perception of category’s members as already shown for vowels (Perceptual Magnet Effect). The idea behind the paper is that intonation categories may show peculiar characteristics, due to the variety of meanings conveyed and functions performed by intonation. Two pitch accents found in Pisa Italian are investigated by means of a set of experiments explicitly designed to study the Perceptual Magnet Effect, including an identification, a goodness rating and a discrimination test. The results show that it is possible to identify a best and a worst exemplar, a prototype and a non-prototype for each category, although this may not be enough to observe a Perceptual Magnet Effect. It is then argued that a possible explanation for this result is that members of an intonation category may communicate various nuances of the meaning expressed by the category and the subject’s sensitivity to these shades of meaning may disfavor the consistency of results that point to the perceptual attraction played by the prototype of an intonation category; in fact, differences between members could be perceived depending on the slightly different interpretation the subject may make when judging them. Therefore a final context matching goodness rating test is described, in which a context calling for a strong or a weak interpretation of the category meaning is given and subjects are asked to rate the way category’s members match the two given interpretations. The results show that members of intonational categories may be judged as variably appropriated to represent different shades of the meaning expressed by a category. Apart from being the first work on prototypes of intonational categories in Italian and one of the very few investigations on prototypes of intonational categories in general, the paper underlines the difficulty in pinning down meaning in order to exercise the appropriate control on subject interpretation during perception experiments. In particular, it shows that the reference to the main category meaning during perception experiments may disfavor the emergence of a clear Perceptual Magnet Effect. In this respect the results suggest that presenting stimuli with an associated pragmatic context may indeed restrict the potential interpretations, possibly favoring a greater consistency of the results.