Using tone and break indices labelling to document patterns of prosodic prominence and their acoustic effects in a database of spoken Italian sentences

Abstract

This study examined how tonal prominence impacts the acoustic cues to features of Italian vowels. It was one aspect of an analysis of the LaMIT (Lexical Access Model for Italian) project [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, Chicago, IL, 8–12 December (2020)]. We strove to understand and systematize the quantitative changes to vowel quality provoked by prosodic and lexical stress, using the LaMIT corpus (100 Italian sentences recited twice by four speakers). Prominent vowels were classified with the TOBI (Tones and Break Indices) labelling method. Accents deemed tonally prominent, known as “pitch accents,” were starred and given a label that reflected their F0 contours. Labels were limited to those put forth by Avesani (“ToBIt: Un sistema di trascrizione per l’intonazione italiana,” in Atti 5e Giornate di Studio del Gruppo di Fonetica Sperimentale, Povo, Italy, pp. 85–98) as constitutive of the prosody of standard Italian. Labels also marked silences, elisions, and spaces between words. Results will clarify if prominence in Italian induces enhanced vowel sonority, or instead a “hyperarticulation” of distinctive segments, contributing to an ongoing debate on the subject.