Abstract
Most research on tune meaning has focussed on the contribution of the nuclear configuration (composed of nuclear accent, phrase accent and boundary tone), while the meaning contribution of the prenuclear contour (i.e., the intonational region preceding the nuclear accent) is still understudied. In Neapolitan Italian, differences in early (L+H*) vs. late (L*+H) nuclear accent alignment are used to differentiate narrow focus statements and yes/no questions. Furthermore, a tone appears to be inserted at the right edge of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in the prenuclear contour, which is differently specified in questions (HAP) and in statements (LAP). In this paper, we test the hypothesis that such a difference in AP tonal specification would help Neapolitan listeners to recover the contrast between questions and statements early within the intonation phrase. Both an identification and a semantic differential task were run on gated stimuli, in which the nuclear accent information was omitted. Results show that the prenuclear contour carries enough information in order to distinguish the two intonation modalities and that AP scaling manipulation significantly affects listeners’ judgments. This challenges the idea that the nuclear configuration alone is relevant for the questions-statements distinction, thus implying that tune meaning is the result of the interaction between prenuclear and nuclear f 0 contours.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Note that, in such compositional view, the relationship between tunes and speech acts (like ‘assertion’ or ‘question’) is not one-to-one, so that the same tune can be associated to different speech acts, and vice versa. For example, the H* L- L% pattern might occasionally be employed with wh- questions in American English.
- 2.
Another possible hypothesis is that the tone following the prenuclear peak is part of the prenuclear accent. This would lead us to reanalyse the prenuclear accent as tritonal, with a different phonological specification for statements (LH*L) and questions (LH*H or even LH*!H). Apart from theory-internal type of arguments against such a proposal (see Grice 1995), preliminary studies have also found that, in Neapolitan, this tone is consistently aligned around the end of the prosodic word, independently of the prenuclear rise temporal location (Petrone 2008), thus suggesting that we are dealing with an edge tone. Moreover, D’Imperio and Petrone (2008) and Petrone (2008) found that this tone is not accompanied by the percept of an intermediate phrase break nor by a degree of final lengthening comparable to that at the end of an intermediate phrase, thus suggesting that it would mark the right boundary of a smaller prosodic constituent, i.e., the AP.
- 3.
We label the prenuclear rise as (LH*) to distinguish it from the nuclear L+H* accent of narrow focus statements. Specifically, while the peak in the L+H* accent seems to have a secondary association with the first mora in the accented syllable, the peak in the (LH*) does not have any secondary association with segmental anchors in the metrical structure (Prieto et al. 2005).
- 4.
- 5.
In statistics, it is still unclear how to calculate the number of degrees of freedom in regression models including random factors. In mixed models, a valid alternative to “standard” p-values is to calculate the p-value from a MONTE CARLO sampling by Markov chain (pMCMC = Monte Carlo Markov Chain; see Baayen 2008). Such values, automatically calculated by the lme4 R package, are reported here to evaluate the statistical significance of the fixed factors in our models.
References
André, Carine, Alain Ghio, Christian Cavé, and Bernard Teston. 2007. PERCEVAL: PERCeption EVALuation Auditive and Visuelle (version 3.0.4). http://www.lpl.univaix.fr/∼lpl/dev/perceval
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistic. Cambridge: CUP.
Bartels, Christine. 1999. Towards a Compositional Interpretation of English Statement and Question Intonation. New York: Garland.
Brinckmann, Caren, and Ralf Benzmueller. 1999. The relationship between utterance type and F0 contour in German. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 1999, Budapest, vol. 1, 21–24.
Chen, Aoju. 2003. Reaction Time as an indicator of discrete intonational contrast in English. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003, Geneva, 97–100.
D’Imperio, Mariapaola. 2000. The Role of Perception in Defining Tonal Targets and their Alignment. Ph.D. Thesis, The Ohio State University.
D’Imperio, Mariapaola, Francesco Cangemi, and Lisa Brunetti. 2008. The phonetics and phonology of contrastive topic constructions in Italian. Poster presented at the 3 rd Conference on Tone and Intonation in Europe, September 15–17, Lisbon, Portugal.
D’Imperio, Mariapaola, and David House. 1997. Perception of Questions and Statements in Neapolitan Italian. In Proceedings of Eurospeech ’97, Rhodes, Greece, vol. 1, 251–254.
D’Imperio, Mariapaola, and Caterina Petrone. 2008. Is the Clitic Group tonally marked in Italian questions and statements? Poster presented at the 11th International Conference on Laboratory Phonology, June 30–July 2, Wellington, New Zealand.
Dombrowski, Ernst. 2003. Semantic features of accent contours: effects of F0 peak position and F0 time shape. In Proceedings of the International Conference of Phonetic Sciences, 1217–1220, Barcelona, Spain.
Grabe, Esther, Carlos Gussenhoven, Judith Haan, Erwin Marsi, and Brechtje Post. 1998. Preaccentual pitch and speaker attitude in Dutch. Language and Speech 41: 63–85.
Grice, Martine. 1995. Leading tones and downstep in English. Phonology 12: 183–233.
Grice, Martine, Mariapaola D’ Imperio, Michelina Savino, and Cinzia Avesani. 2005. Towards a strategy for labelling varieties of Italian. In Sun-Ah Jun, (ed.) Prosodic Typology and Transcription: A Unified Approach, 53–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grosjean, François. 1980. Spoken word recognition processes and the gating paradigm. Perception and Psychophysics 28: 267–283.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 1984. On the Grammar and Semantics of Sentence Accents. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2002. Intonation and interpretation: Phonetics and phonology. In Bernard Bel and Isabelle Marilier, (eds.) Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 45–57, Aix-en-Provence.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The Phonology of Tone and Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gussenhoven, Carlos, and Aoju Chen. 2000. Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 6(II): 91–94.
Haan, Judith. 2001. Speaking of Questions. An Exploration of Dutch Question Intonation. LOT Dissertation Series 52, LOT, Utrecht.
Ladd, D. Robert. 2008. Intonational Phonology (II edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lahiri, Aditi, and William Marslen-Wilson. 1991. The mental representation of lexical form: A phonological approach to the recognition lexicon. Cognition 38: 254–294.
Ohala, John. 1983. Cross-language use of pitch: an ethological view. Phonetica 40: 1–18.
Marandin, Jean-Marie. 2006. Contours as Constructions. In Doris Schoenefeld (ed.) Constructions All Over; Case Studies and Theoretical Implications, Ms available at http://www.constructions-online.de/articles/specvol1
Marandin, Jean-Marie, Claire Beyssade, Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie, Jenny Doutjes, Anne Rialland, and Michel de Fornel. 2004. The meaning of final contours in French. Ms available at http://www.llf.cnrs/ Gens/ Marandin
Moulines, Eric, and Francis Charpentier. 1990. Pitch-synchronous waveform processing techniques for text-to-speech synthesis using diphones. Speech Communication 9: 453–467.
Niebuhr, Oliver. 2007. The signalling of German rising-falling intonation categories-the interplay of synchronization, shape, and height. Phonetica 64: 174–193.
Niebuhr, Oliver, and Klaus Kohler. 2004. Perception and cognitive processing of tonal alignment in German. In Proceedings of the TAL Conference, 155–158.
Petrone, Caterina. 2008. Le rôle de la variabilité phonétique dans la représentation des contours intonatifs et de leur sens. Ph.D. Thesis, Université de Provence, France.
Petrone, Caterina. 2010. At the interface between phonetics and pragmatics: Non-local F0 effects on the perception of Cosenza Italian tunes. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010.
Petrone, Caterina, and Mariapaola D’Imperio. 2008. Tonal structure and constituency in Neapolitan Italian: Evidence for the accentual phrase in statements and questions. In Plinio A. Barbosa, Sandra Madureira, and César Reis, (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Speech Prosody, 301–304, Campinas, Brazil.
Petrone, Caterina, and Oliver Niebuhr. 2009. The role of the prenuclear f 0 region in the perception of German questions and statements. Talk presented at 9th Conference on Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia. Presentation available at http://www.linguistik.uni-kiel.de/Niebuhr_index.html
Petrone, Caterina, and D. Robert Ladd. 2007. Sentence domain effects on tonal alignment in Italian. In Jürgen. Trouvain, and William. J. Barry, (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of Phonetic Sciences, vol. 2, 1253–1256, Saarbruecken, Germany.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 1980. The Phonology and Phonetics of English intonation. Ph.D. Thesis, MIT.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B., and Mary E. Beckman. 1988. Japanese Tone Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B., and Julia Hirschberg. 1990. The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack, (eds.) Intentions in Communication, pp. 271–311. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B., and Shirley Steele. 1987. How many rise-fall-rise contours?. Proceedings of the 11 th International Conference of Phonetic Sciences (IChPS 1987), 145–148.
Pinheiro, José C., and Douglas Bates. 2000. Mixed-Effects Models in S and S-Plus. Statistics and Computing Series. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
Prieto, Pilar, Mariapaola D’Imperio, and Barbara Gili-Fivela. 2005. Pitch accent alignment in Romance: primary and secondary associations with metrical structure. Language and Speech 48: 359–396.
R Development Core Team. 2008. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. http://www.R-project.org
Rathcke, Tamara, and Jonathan Harrington. 2010. The variability of early accent peaks in Standard German. In Cécile Fougeron, Barbara Ka Hnert and Mariapaola D’Imperio, (eds.) Papers in Laboratory Phonology 10, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Savino, Michelina, and Martine Grice. 2007. The role of pitch range in realising pragmatic contrasts – The case of two question types in Italian. In Jürgen. Trouvain, and William. J. Barry, (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007), 1037–1040, Saarbruecken, Germany.
Savino, Michelina, and Martine Grice. 2008. Reaction time in the perception of intonational contrast in italian, paper presented at TIE3 Conference, Lisbon 15–17 Sept. 2008.
Schneider, Katrin, Britta Lintfert, Grzegorz Dogil, and Bernd Möbius. 2006. Phonetic grounding of prosodic categories. In Stefan Sudhoff, Denisa Lenertová, Roland Meyer, Sandra Pappert, Petra Augurzky, Ina Mleinek, Nicole Richter, and Johannes Schließer (eds.), Methods in Empirical Prosody Research, 335–361. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.
Steedman, Mark. 2003. Information-structural semantics for English intonation. (Paper to LSA Summer Institute Workshop on Topic and Focus, Santa Barbara July 2001). Ms available at www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/∼steedman/.
’t Hart, Johan. 1981. Differential sensitivity to pitch distance. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 69: 811–821.
Uldall, Elizabeth T. 1960. Attitudinal meanings conveyed by intonation contours. Language and Speech 3: 223–234.
van Heuven Vincent J., and Judith Haan. 2000. Phonetic correlates of statement versus question intonation in Dutch. In Antonis Botinis, (ed.) Intonation. Analysis, Modelling and Technology, 119–143. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
van Heuven, Vincent J., and Ellen van Zanten. 2005. Speech rate as a secondary prosodic characteristic of polarity questions in three languages. Speech Communication 47: 87–99.
Acknowledgments
This article developed material presented at the Conference TIE3 and we are very grateful to the audience of the conference. Thanks also to Sue Hertz and Lisa Selkirk for fruitful discussions and to reviewers for comments to an earlier version of the paper. Thanks also to Dr. Cinzia Citraro for technical help. All errors are of course ours.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Petrone, C., D’Imperio, M. (2011). From Tones to Tunes: Effects of the f 0 Prenuclear Region in the Perception of Neapolitan Statements and Questions. In: Frota, S., Elordieta, G., Prieto, P. (eds) Prosodic Categories: Production, Perception and Comprehension. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0137-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0137-3_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-0136-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-0137-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)