Effects of tonal alignment on lexical identification in Italian

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of tonal alignment in Italian variety spoken in Naples. We focused on the effects of intonation in the perception of minimal pairs contrasting in consonant duration. Spectrographic analyses show that the timing of pitch accent varies with the syllable structure (see also [1]). In open syllable (CV), the pitch peak is realized within the stressed vowel, while in the closed syllable (CVC) the peak is reached at the end of the accented syllable, associated with the last consonant. In order to analyze these effects, series of words contrasting in consonant duration and inserted in the same segmental environment were produced by a native speaker. Two kinds of manipulation were performed. First, we modified the length of the stressed vowel and the following consonant in five steps; then, the timing of the pitch peak was modified in four steps, too. Finally, a set of resynthesized stimuli was created by the combination of all the different steps of duration and pitch: this set constituted our basis for the perception experiments. We asked thirteen Neapolitan people to listen to the stimuli, and to identify them with either one word or the other of each pair. Our results show that manipulation of intonation was significant for the stimuli coming from the CVC words. That is, a garden path effect (or: a shift in responses) related to the timing of the pitch peak was found. These results lend support to the hypothesis that the listeners use temporal alignment for the perception of segmental identity and that the contribution of intonation both in production and in perception is a fundamental source of linguistic information