Acoustic cues to features for Italian vowels as a function of lexical stress and tonal prominence

Abstract

This study investigated how acoustic cues to features in Italian vowels are affected by lexical stress and tonal prominence. One aspect of an analysis on the LaMIT (Lexical Access Model for Italian) project, this study analyzed the impact of prosodic environment on acoustic cues to features. The LaMIT corpus consists of 100 unique sentences uttered twice by four native Italian speakers [Di Benedetto et al., “Speech recognition of spoken Italian based on detection of landmarks and other acoustic cues to distinctive features,” in 179th ASA Meeting (2020)]. This preliminary experiment focused on vowel /a/. Duration, F0, height, and frontness (measured by F1 and F2 formant frequencies) were estimated for 1098 /a/ instantiations. Every sentence was also annotated for tonal prominence with TOBI (DeCaprio et al., “Using TOBI labels to document patterns of prosodic prominence and their acoustic effects in the LaMIT database,” in 181st ASA Meeting (2021)]. Preliminary results show that lexical stress and tonal prominence of /a/ generally have a measurable impact on the vowel’s acoustic realization. Specifically, F1 values of stressed /a/ are greater than those of unstressed /a/; likewise, F1 values of tonally prominent /a/ (always stressed) are greater than those of their stressed but non-prominent counterparts.