Michelina Savino

The intonation of polar questions in Italian: Where is the rise?

Earlier studies on Standard Italian describe polar questions as being characterised by a terminal rise, as opposed to a terminal fall for statements, where a low/falling accentual movement precedes the terminal part of the contour in both sentence types. The same is generally claimed for the Northern and Central Italian varieties (including Florentine, i.e. the variety from which Standard Italian stems), whereas Southern accents are characterised by an accentual rise followed by a terminal fall, being therefore the primary cue for question in non-terminal position. However, a closer look at the existing literature on regional Italian question intonation reveals that such a geographical distribution of intonational features across Italian accents is not that clear-cut. A reason for this discrepancy might be the different speaking styles – here intended as the broad spontaneous vs. read distinction – of the spoken productions analysed. The aim of this paper is to call into question the claim that a terminal rise preceded by an accentual low/fall is the most widespread intonational feature for marking questioning across Italian accents. The goal is to provide a clearer picture of question intonation in Italian by looking at the distribution of the rise as either on terminal or non-terminal position across a large number of varieties, where speech materials have been elicited with the same methodology, and they are therefore homogeneous with respect to speaking style. Intonation analysis has been carried out on spontaneous yes–no questions extracted from the Map Task dialogues collected in the CLIPS national corpus (Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto – Corpora and Lexicons of Spoken and Written Italian) covering 15 varieties of Italian. Results of this analysis on the Northern, Central, and Southern polar questions reveals that the accentual rise prevails, and that the distribution of the rise across varieties is independent of the geography.

The Perception of Negative Bias in Bari Italian Questions

This paper investigates two types of questions. OBJECTS, challenging the interlocutor’s assumption that information is shared, are biased towards a negative answer, whereas QUERIES, asking for new information, are generally neutral. In Bari Italian they are both produced with the same pitch accent. However, the height of the pitch peak tends to be greater in OBJECTS. To investigate the perceptual relevance of peak height in distinguishing between these two question types, we carried out a semantically motivated identification task, followed by a discrimination task, recording reaction times in both cases. Results show that listeners can categorically interpret utterances as QUERY or OBJECT on the basis of peak height only. However, their ability to discriminate between pairs of stimuli is poor, thus providing further evidence that categorical interpretation of intonation (like that of vowels) is possible in a labelling task, where listeners have to access linguistic knowledge, whereas it is not possible in a discrimination task, where listeners rely predominantly on psychoacoustic abilities. Results point to the necessity for including [high peak] in the phonology of this variety.

Spatial reorientation decline in aging: the combination of geometry and landmarks

ABSTRACT Objectives: The study is focused on the assessment of reorientation skills in a sample of community-dwelling elderly people, manipulating landmarks and geometric (layout) information. Method: A neuropsychological assessment was administered to 286 elderly participants, divided into six groups (healthy controls, HC; four subgroups of participants with mild cognitive impairment, MCI; participants with probable dementia, Prob_D) and tested with the Virtual Reorientation Test (VReoT). VReoT manipulated different spatial cues: geometry and landmarks (proximal and distal). Result: Compared with HC, participants with MCI and Prob_D showed to be impaired in tasks involving geometry, landmarks and a combination of them. Both single and multiple domain impairment in MCI had an impact on reorientation performance. Moreover, VReoT was marginally able to discriminate between amnesic and non-amnesic MCI. The occurrence of getting lost events seemed to be associated to learning of geometric information. Conclusion: The associative strength between landmark and target plays an important role in affecting spatial orientation performance of cognitively impaired participants. Geometry significantly supports landmark information and becomes helpful with the increase of cognitive impairment which is linked to a decrement in landmark encoding. VReoT seems to represent a reliable evaluation supplement for spatial orientation deficits in prodromal stages of dementia.

Measuring Prosodic Entrainment in Italian Collaborative Game-Based Dialogues

In a large number of studies, it has been observed that conversational partners tend to adapt each other’s speech over the course of the interaction. This phenomenon, variously named as entrainment, coordination, alignment or adaptation, is widely believed to be crucial to mutual understanding and successful communication in human interaction. Modelling human adaptation in speech behaviour would also be very important for improving naturalness in voiced-based human-machine interaction systems. Recently, a body of research in this field has been devoted to find evidence of prosodic entrainment by measuring a number of acoustic-prosodic parameters in some languages, yet not in Italian. Our study offers a contribution to this research line. We analysed game-based collaborative dialogues between Italian speakers, by measuring their articulation rate, pitch range, pitch level and loudness. Results show some evidence of overall speech coordination (convergence and synchrony) between conversational partners, wherein the combination of specific prosodic parameters involved may vary across dialogues. Our results are in line with those obtained in previous studies on other languages, thus contributing to providing a useful basis for modelling prosodic adaptation in multilingual spoken dialogue systems.

Word final schwa is driven by intonation—The case of Bari Italian

In order to convey pragmatic functions, a speaker has to select an intonation contour (the tune) in addition to the words that are to be spoken (the text). The tune and text are assumed to be independent of each other, such that any one intonation contour can be produced on different phrases, regardless of the number and nature of the segments they are made up of. However, if the segmental string is too short, certain tunes-especially those with a rising component-call for adjustments to the text. In Italian, for instance, loan words such as chat can be produced with a word final schwa when this word occurs at the end of a question. This paper investigates this word final schwa in the Bari variety in a number of different intonation contours. Although its presence and duration is to some extent dependent on idiosyncratic properties of speakers and words, schwa is largely conditioned by intonation. Schwa cannot thus be considered a mere phonetic artefact, since it is relevant for phonology, in that it facilitates the production of communicatively relevant intonation contours.

Acknowledgement or reply? prosodic features for disambiguating pragmatic functions of the italian token ‘sì’

This paper explores the role of some prosodic features in disambiguating three different pragmatic meanings of the multifunctional Italian token `sì (yes), namely: a) acknowledgement with passive recipiency (implying the speaker intention of yielding the turn), b) acknowledgement with incipient speakership (implying the speaker intention of taking the turn), and c) positive reply to a yes-no question. Pragmatic and prosodic analysis of Bari Italian Map Task dialogues indicates that F0 contour on its own is a reliable cue for discriminating a) from b) and c), whereas it is uneffective for b) vs c) distinction, since in a) the terminal contour is predominantly rising, whereas in both b) and c) it is falling. However, for the b) vs c) distinction other prosodic parameters can play a role, namely duration, intensity and F0 range. We also reported a number of cases where `sì tokens of type a) are also characterised by a falling F0 contour, making them impossible to distinguish from b) and c) types. For these cases, we found indications that other prosodic features could play a disambiguation role.

The Intonation of Backchannel Tokens in Italian Collaborative Dialogues

This paper offers a contribution to the intonational modelling of backchannel lexical and non-lexical tokens in Italian, which can be used for improving naturalness in voice-based dialogue systems. Results of pragmatic and intonation analysis of five Map Task dialogues show that backchannel tokens can convey the intention of giving vs taking the floor by means of a rising vs falling terminal contour. However, they also indicate that this general rule can be override when other pragmatic and/or paralinguistic meanings need to be additionally conveyed.