On the role of prosody in disambiguating wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives in Cosenza Italian

This work investigates the role of prosody in the perception of wh-exclamatives and (information-seeking) wh-interrogatives in Cosenza Italian, a Southern Ital- ian variety spoken in Calabria. Following recent research on prosody, we use a two-alternative forced-choice identification task in combination with reaction time measurements, as reaction times have been used as a better substitute of discrimination scores to investigate categorical perception of prosodic contrasts. Here, this methodology is preferred to more difficult offline tasks (e.g. the gating paradigm) to test to what extent phonetic/phonological cues distributed over the utterance might guide listeners’ responses during sentence type identification. Our results show that listeners identify the two sentence types after the end of the utterance in most of the trials, not before it. This suggests that prosodic cues that occur before the end of the utterance (e.g. in the prenuclear section of the intonational contour) are not strong enough by themselves to guide the pragmatic interpretation of the utterances. Furthermore, our study shows that exclamatives are processed faster than interrogatives, but this effect disappears when segmental duration is taken into account