Influence of semantics on the perception of corrective focus in spoken Italian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2018/09/0006/000339Keywords:
contrastive focus, prosody, perception, semantics, psychoacousticsAbstract
This study is a web-based, psychoacoustic test for adult, Italian native speakers, investigating the detection of different prosodic phenomena in Standard Italian utterances. The purpose was to investigate the influence of semantics on the human ability to recognize different prosodic aspects, in order to understand the basic pieces of information involved in the psychoacoustic process of verbal comprehension. In particular, one section of the test regarded the ability to recognize the presence of a Corrective Focus, which is a spoken constituent that is a direct rejection of an alternative. Results show that Corrective Focus seems difficult to detect in isolated audio utterances. Semantics seems to improve detection accuracy; phonotactics, instead, seems not to add useful information; finally, our test confirms a correlation with prominent syllables.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
