Analysing the tune meaning is often equivalent to analysing the meaning contribution of the “nucleus” (the intonation region starting from the last pitch accented syllable until the end of the intonation phrase). In this paper we report results from an identification task in Cosenza Italian, suggesting that listeners are able to identify the contrast between questions and statements by exploiting phonetic differences in the implementation of the rise-fall prenuclear contour. Such results mirror previous studies on Neapolitan and German and raise questions on the contribution of prenuclear f0 details to tune meaning.
Index Terms: Intonation, perception, phonetic variability, meaning compositionality, Cosenza Italian.
Cite as: Petrone, C. (2010) At the interface between phonetics and pragmatics: non-local F0 effects on the perception of Cosenza Italian tunes. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 966
@inproceedings{petrone10_speechprosody,
author={Caterina Petrone},
title={{At the interface between phonetics and pragmatics: non-local F0 effects on the perception of Cosenza Italian tunes}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 966}
}