Book series Studi AISV

Prefazione

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Il volume raccoglie alcuni dei contributi discussi durante il XVIII Convegno Nazionale dell’AISV (Associazione Italiana di Scienze della Voce), che si è svolto presso l’Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II” nel maggio 2022, dal titolo La posizione del parlante nell’interazione: atteggiamenti, intenzioni ed emozioni nella comunicazione verbale. Il convegno invitava alla riflessione su tutti gli aspetti legati in vario modo alla posizione assunta dal parlante negli scambi verbali, vale a dire sulle risorse linguistiche e “paralinguistiche” espresse per affermare la propria (pre)(dis)posizione e il proprio atteggiamento verso l’altro.

The emergence of lexical and post-lexical prominence in Italian

2024-02-29T17:06:35+01:00

Our study identifies the developmental trajectory of prominence at lexical and post-lexical levels. From very early in life infants are sensitive to lexical stress contrasts, but, due to very limited vocal capabilities, the production of stress contrasts only starts in the second year of age. We address the question of whether, when and how a child learns to differentiate lexical (stress) from post-lexical prominence (accent) by acoustically examining the spontaneous productions of one child from North-East Italy recorded every 3 months from 18 to 36 months of age. Our analysis is cast in the framework of the Autosegmental Metrical Theory of Intonation. Results show that during the child’s prosodic development the duration of IP nuclear vowels increases linearly, the duration of unstressed vowels decreases linearly and the duration of stressed, prenuclear and ip nuclear vowels is progressively but non-linearly adjusted, consistent with the adult prosodic hierarchy.

Narrating complexity

2024-02-29T17:18:35+01:00

We carried out an exploratory study of narrative complexity, focussing on coarse phonetic measures such as the duration and number of interpausal units. Our corpus features picturebased narratives produced by twenty German speakers from Switzerland. The task was designed to elicit simple and complex narratives, depending on the order of appearance of the events and the number of characters in the pictures. Our results show that complex stories have longer overall duration and higher number of interpausal units. A closer look reveals that most of the additional interpausal units in complex stories are short in duration and contain few syllables. Despite inter-speaker variation, this trend is also confirmed at the individual level. In our interpretation, even coarse quantitative phonetic metrics suggest that narrative complexity results not only into more material (i.e. duration), but also into less cohesion (i.e. fragmentation).

Comparing dialectal and Italian prosody: the case of Venetian

2024-02-29T17:27:25+01:00

The following paper aims at setting out a novel methodology in the prosodic comparison between two varieties in contact, the dialect spoken in Venice and the regional Italian spoken in Venice. By deploying a reading task, we compare the rhythmical properties of the two systems and review different metrics. We show that speakers can switch their metrical organization when switching language, but this is sensitive to those segmental processes which differentiate the two systems in contact.

Communicative situation and code selection: Italian and dialect in a migrant community

2024-02-29T17:34:21+01:00

In this paper, I analyzed code selection and variation in use of dialect and English in four different conversations collected in the Italian community in Bedford (UK). The linguistic variables taken into account in the study are: code selection (Italian vs dialect), use of English, features of the local dialect. The first conversation deals with an interview and the others are spontaneous conversations that one single speaker, Giovanni, has with friends from his own village of origin. All the recordings have in common one speaker, Giovanni, whose linguistic behaviour has been deeply investigated. The results gave evidence that Giovanni prefers dialect with his friends born in Montefalcione and Italian with the interviewer who is not perceived as a member of the Italian community of Bedford. Variation was found also in use of English and in the selection of more conservative variants of the local dialect.

Between economy of effort and speech accuracy in hypokinetic dysarthria

2024-02-29T17:38:43+01:00

This paper aims at observing if dysarthric speakers affected by Parkinson’s disease maintain phonological distinctions (/s/ vs. /t/) and sociophonetic features ([t^h]), since they both require a precise control of fine gestures though have a different impact on communication.Acoustic data collected on speech corpora representing different speech styles were analysed with regard to the duration of consonants and to the COG in fricatives as well as in the VOT interval identified in plosives. Results show that pathological speakers distinguish plosives from fricatives even though with an overall shorter duration in comparison with controls. Moreover, data suggest that aspiration as a sociolinguistic marker may be not preserved through compensatory strategies as much as the difference between phonologically relevant segments.

Italian Teacher Talk

2024-02-29T17:44:13+01:00

Teacher talk shares many of the linguistic features of other kinds of simplified registers (foreigner talk, baby talk, elderspeak), in which listener-oriented modifications are used with different addressees who may not be fully competent in the language. The present study intends to investigate rhythmical-prosodic features in the speech of two female teachers of Italian, both from the Campania region, aged 44 and 48. They were recorded in two different educational settings: in secondary schools, teaching to native Italian students; in L2 Italian classes for immigrants hosted by a voluntary association in Naples. Eight monologic samples were selected from the corpus and spectroacustically analysed, allowing the calculation of articulation rate, speech rate, fluency, speech time composition and tonal range. Results show that when teachers speak to non-native learners, they do not modify the rate at which they articulate phones; instead they use longer and more frequent silent pauses and a more reduced tonal range than with native students.

Gender influence on phonetic turn-taking cues at potential transition locations in German

2024-02-29T17:49:37+01:00

Phonetic cues have been found to play a fundamental role in the turn-taking mechanism by helping to signal to the interlocutor(s) the intentions of the current speaker for the upcoming turn. Since previous sociolinguistic research described the existence of gender specific behaviors in interactions, it could be the case that interlocutors’ genders might influence the way different speakers use turn-taking cues to signal their conversational intentions. This research aims at investigating the influence of the gender of the speaker and the gender of the interlocutor on phonetic turn-taking cues, i.e., F0 movements, intensity and segmental duration, towards potential transition locations in two-party conversations between German native speakers. The results suggest that both the speakers’ and the interlocutors’ genders might influence the way potential transition locations are phonetically marked in conversations.

The use of Backchannels and other Very Short Utterances by Italian Learners of German

2024-02-29T17:53:12+01:00

Backchannels (BCs) positively contribute to fluency in social interactions. However, their realisation is language-specific, which can cause miscommunication in intercultural contexts. Nevertheless, backchanneling is not formally taught in most classroom settings. To find out whether L2 learners still manage to acquire a target-like BC behaviour, we carried out an exploratory study on Italian learners of L2 German. We recorded Map Task dialogues performed by 6 dyads speaking L1 Italian and L2 German at different proficiency levels and 5 dyads speaking L1 German. We extracted BCs, defined as acknowledgment tokens, and other very short utterances (VSUs) with the same lexical realisation as BCs, but different functions. We analysed their frequency, length and lexical type according to their function. Preliminary results suggest that dyad-specific patterns play a larger role than L2 proficiency when predicting BC frequency and length. As for lexical choice of BC types, L2 learners prefer items shared with their L1 Italian. Specifically German types are only used by advanced learners, indicating a role of proficiency in this aspect of BC production.

A Crosslinguistic Study on Filled Pauses and Prolongations in Italian and Spanish

2024-02-29T17:58:20+01:00

Although disfluencies exhibit universal properties, comparative studies have demonstrated cross-linguistic differences as well. This study provides a first comparison between Italian and Spanish, investigating formal and functional features of filled pauses (FPs) and prolongations (PRLs) in dialogical speech. For both phenomena, duration was examined. As regards FPs, we looked at their segmental composition and the surrounding context; for PRLs, we considered the lexical category of the word and the position within the word in which they occur. Beyond individual variability, both Italian and Spanish speakers use more PRLs than FPs, with no interlinguistic duration differences. Furthermore, vocalic finalword PRLs are cross-linguistically preferred. However, Italian speakers present a general higher rate of disfluencies. Finally, FPs show a different segmental composition – related to the language-specific phonetic/phonological inventory –, and seem to be involved in different sub-functions.

Modeling Hesitations. Speech Synthesis Application and Evaluation

2024-02-29T18:04:19+01:00

Studies have shown that elements like silent pauses, segmental lengthenings, and fillers are naturally involved in the economy of speech and, in specific patterns, may contribute to communication in both human-human and human-machine interactions. Therefore, research on speech synthesis aimed at developing more natural-sounding systems by inserting hesitation phenomena. However, audio issues were found to arise when synthesising filled pauses. Only recently, speech synthesisers based on Deep Neural Networks achieved better performances. In this study, we provide a first perceptual evaluation of a model of occurrence of hesitations (lengthenings, silent pauses as well as fillers) in Italian utterances using a stateof-the-art neural TTS system. A set of experimental stimuli were synthesized and subjected to listeners’ evaluations in a discrimination test. Results show that synthetic utterances that include hesitations, according to the linguistic model, are judged as more natural sounding than utterances that do not include any.

La posizione del parlante nell’interazione: atteggiamenti, intenzioni ed emozioni nella comunicazione verbale [The position of the speaker in interaction: attitudes, intentions, and emotions in verbal communication]

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