Mariapaola D'Imperio

• Ph.D. in Linguistics, The Ohio State University
• Professor (Full) at Aix-Marseille University

Previous research has shown that prosodic structure can regulate the relationship between co-speech gestures and speech itself. Most co-speech studies have focused on manual gestures, but head movements have also been observed to accompany speech events by Munhall, Jones, Callan, Kuratate, and Vatikiotis-Bateson [(2004). Psychol. Sci. 15(2), 133-13...

In languages such as Italian, lexical stress can be cued by vowel duration. Stressed syllables can also attract F0 modulations in the shape of pitch accents. F0 modulations, however, have also been found to lend prominence to unstressed, pretonic syllables, both in Italian and other Romance languages. The present study investigates pretonic promine...

The paper investigates the relationship between exposure to non-native dialects or foreign languages and the extraction of pragmatic meaning from intonational cues, with specific reference to the identification of speaker certainty towards the answer in questions. While previous research on language exposure has been primarily concerned with the ph...

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible alter...

This work presents an analysis of the intonation competence in a group of Italian children with cochlear implant (CI). Early cochlear implantation plays a crucial role in language development for children who were born deaf in that it favours the acquisition of complex aspects of language, such as the intonation structure. A story-generation task,...

Previous research has shown that rhythmic head movement accompanies F0 modulations in speech (Munhall et al., 1994) and that this co-verbal head movement may be linked to prosodic features such as pitch accents and prosodic boundaries (Esteve-Gibert et al., 2017; Hadar et al., 1984; House et al., 2001). In this study, we examined how the production...

Rhythmic, co-verbal movement of the head always accompanies speech (Munhall et al., 1994). Previ- ous work on rhythmic head gestures (head-nods and eyebrow movements) during speech specifically focused on timing and motor organization. These studies suggested that co-verbal head movements are linked to the production of prosodic features of speech...

No PDF available ABSTRACT The tendency for questions to be realized with a high or rising pitch has long been held as a (near-) universal property of world languages (Bolinger, 1978; Ohala, 1984, a.o) and even lead to ethological theories as the “Biological Codes,” in particular the “Frequency Code” (Gussenhoven, 2002). Rialland (2007,2009) documen...

The paper investigates the interplay between intonational cues and individual variability in the perceptual assessment of speaker’s epistemic bias in Salerno Italian yes-no questions. We present a perception experiment in which we manipulated pitch span within the nuclear configuration (both nuclear accent and boundary tone) to predict degree of pe...

The paper addresses the issue of variability in the mapping between intonation and meaning in Salerno Italian. The general hypothesis tested is that variation of both the phonological and phonetic levels of intonation reflects speaker's commitment to the proposition expressed. Here we report an investigation of the intonational meaning in wh-questi...

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inf...

Communicative exchanges require listeners to understand the pragmatic intentions behind the interlocutor’s speech acts, and our skills in inferring others’ social and pragmatic states seem to affect this linguistic understanding. By means of a visual-world eye-tracking task, this study aimed at investigating how individual empathy skills impact the...

The present study aims at uncovering the impact of dynamic details of intonational rises sharing the same tonal description but differing in the actual shape of the F0 contour. Two French rising final contours, both labelled as LH*H% in AM, are used to mark continuations or yes/no questions. The hypothesis tested here is that a perceptual differenc...

Two rising French contours, both labelled as H*H%, are used respectively as a continuation rise or a yes/no question terminal in French [1, 2, 3]. The two contours also differ in terms of duration, with continuation rises showing longer pre-boundary lengthening [4, 5] while H% height has not been found to be consistently higher in questions [3]. Mo...

While many studies have demonstrated the relationship between musical rhythm and speech prosody, this has been rarely addressed in the context of second language (L2) acquisition. Here, we investigated whether musical rhythmic skills and the production of L2 speech prosody are predictive of one another. We tested both musical and linguistic rhythmi...

One of the main uses of intonation form is to signal pragmatic information. Recent research on intonational meaning has shown that epistemic information about propositional content of utterances within a discourse can also be tonally encoded. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether speaker certainty about the answer to a polar question...

Despite the large number of studies on the intonation of Italian varieties, research on Salerno Italian has been rather scarce and a detailed account of the main phonological patterns is still missing. The intonation analysis we report in this paper is framed within the Autosegmental-Metrical theory and the types of utterances we analyzed are taken...

This work shows that different tune types can evoke different degrees of epistemic bias on the part of the listener towards the answer to the question being asked. Moreover, this bias is mediated by whether or not the subject lived in another city for more than a year. Finally, pitch accent type seems to be more important than boundary tone type in...

Cochlear implanted (CI) children display an array of speech production and perception problems. No study has evaluated the specific use of prosody regarding information structure in the discourse, in French speaking early CI children. This study aims to evaluate prosody production in these children, to determine whether they show prosodic effect...

Based on growing evidence suggesting that professional music training facilitates foreign language perception and learning, we examined the impact of musical expertise on the categorization of syllables including phonemes that did (/p/, /b/) or did not (/ph/) belong to the French repertoire by analyzing both behavior (error rates and reaction times...

Based on the theory biological codes [1], the Frequency code [2] claims that pitch height is a universal correlate of politeness. Other frameworks, while taking a pragmatic approach, [3], [4] claim that high pitch can be employed in both polite and impolite contours and argue for the importance of socio-pragmatic variables in the expression of poli...

Speakers use different strategies in different languages to signal which element in the discourse is particularly informative for the interlocutor, a phenomenon called ‘information focus’. One of the most frequent strategies to achieve this across languages is by prosodic means. In French, for instance, speakers are found to compress the pitch rang...

This study investigates how pre-school French children make use of prosodic and gesture cues to produce sentences in broad focus and narrow (contrastive and corrective) focus conditions. Children’s ability to use prosody for signalling the information status of discourse elements is not mastered until late in development. English-, German-, or Dutc...

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) have to deal with several aspects of voice and speech decline and thus alteration of communication ability during the course of the disease. Among these communication impairments, three major challenges include: (1) dysarthria, consisting of orofacial motor dysfunction and dysprosody, which is linked to the...

Introduction Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) have to deal with several aspects of voice and speech decline and thus alteration of communication ability during the course of the disease. Among these communication impairments, 3 major challenges include: (1) dysarthria, consisting of orofacial motor dysfunction and dysprosody, which is link...

Cet article a pour objectif d’expliciter le lien direct qui existe entre les travaux en prosodie menes aujourd’hui a Aix-en-Provence et les travaux qui ont ete conduits depuis les annees 70 par ce que l’on appelait alors « l’Ecole d’Aix en Prosodie ». Ce lien sera etabli au moyen de trois notions principales : les notions de cible tonale, de consti...

The pragmatic meaning evoked by intonation is known to be processed online by listeners, but less is understood about which part of the contour triggers the meaning interpretation and how individual pragmatic abilities impact intonational processing. Here we investigate the role of empathy skills on the stability and timing of the intonation-meanin...

This study addresses the relationship between information structure and intonation in French. Using an interactive speech production experiment, it tests the hypothesis that the French initial rise (LHi) is used to mark the left edge of a contrastively focused constituent. Since the occurrence of the initial rise is also known to be sensitive to th...

Listeners rapidly process tonal composition and pitch accent placement within an utterance to create expectations about its pragmatic meaning and information structure. It is still unknown whether the nuclear pitch accent alone or a combination of pitch accent and the following edge tone are needed in order to process intonational meaning in French...

On the basis of previous results showing that music training positively influences different aspects of speech perception and cognition, the aim of this series of experiments was to test the hypothesis that adult professional musicians would learn the meaning of novel words through picture–word associations more efficiently than controls without mu...

Analysis and description of Italian children’s prosody for narrative speech in an Autosegmental-Metrical framework.

This special collection consists of papers inspired by topics covered in two different workshops addressing the challenge of prosodic transcription for research in spoken language sciences and for the development of computer speech technologies. At the heart of this collection are discussions of the phonological assumptions behind current approache...

In this paper we present evidence for the phonetic coding of the statement/ question contrast through differences in durational patterns. Data from a reading task in Neapolitan Italian were analyzed using both discrete (phone durations) and continuous (local phone rate) metrics. In the first part we show that, while global utterance duration does n...

Prosodic prominence is an umbrella term encompassing various related but conceptually and functionally different phenomena such as phonological stress, paralinguistic emphasis, lexical, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic salience, to mention a few. Due to the high interest prominence has received from various disciplines, it has been studied from mul...

Speakers are able to adjust their prosodic patterns to approximate those of a different dialect, at least when the dialects involved are phonologically similar [6, 7]. Our study explores imitation across two dialects of English (Singaporean and American) whose prosodic systems are phonologically very distinct. Singaporean speakers were recorded bot...

In Neapolitan Italian, nuclear rises are later in yes/no questions (L*+H) than in narrow focus statements (L+H*). Also, the H target is later in closed syllable items than in open syllable ones. In three identification tasks, we found that, when stimuli are ambiguous between questions and statements, listeners exploit the information on the precise...

Recent studies have investigated phonetic and phonological direct dialect imitation in intonation, though no study has yet explored metrical convergence. In this study we therefore test the assumption that speakers of standard French can mimic the metrical properties of a Southern French variety, having a different foot structure, by inserting a sc...

he chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types a...

This study tests how prosodic boundary strength (i.e., categorical differences between Accentual Phrase, AP, and intermediate phrase, ip, boundaries) per se affects the syntactic parsing of spoken utterances in French. Two forced-choice perception experiments demonstrated that French listeners use prosodic boundary strength (either AP or ip boundar...

The Italian language is characterized by an extremely strong phonetic and phonological variation that differentiates the language across space, communicative situations, social groups and socio-economic classes, and means of communication (Berruto 2010, 2012). In this chapter, we consider the phonetic and phonological variation at the intonational...

The aim of this study was to test whether both phonetic and phonological representations of intonation can be rapidly modified when imitating utterances belonging to a different regional variety of the same language. Our main hypothesis was that tonal alignment, just as other phonetic features of speech, would be rapidly modified by Italian speaker...

Within the autosegmental-metrical approach to French intonation, the existence of an intermediate phrase or ip is controversial. Our study provides strong evidence for its existence, by uncovering systematic pitch-scaling effects within this constituent. We first show that the presence of an ip-break is responsible for blocking recursive downstep o...

The distribution of preboundary lengthening within the phrasefinal word is controversial. In CV syllables immediately preceding a prosodic boundary, the acoustic duration of the syllable onset C is less involved than that of the following rime V in the lengthening phenomenon. Moreover, preboundary lengthening might be extended to the stressed/accen...

This paper introduces the Aix MapTask corpus. This corpus was modelled after the original HCRC Maptask. Lexical mate-rial selection has been carefully crafted for speech and prosodic analysis [1]. We present the design of the lexical material, the protocol and basic quantitative facts about the existing corpus. We also describe an additional face-t...

Verbal irony is characterized by the use of specific acoustic modulations, especially global prosodic cues as well as vowel hyperarticulation. Little is known concerning the expression of sarcastic speech in French. Here we report on global prosodic features of sarcastic speech in a corpus of declarative French utterances. Our data show that sarcas...

In this paper, we will compare prosodic and pragmatic approaches to the role of constituent length in attachment ambiguities. Lengthening a constituent affects its informativity: longer constituents are usually less predictable (Levy & Florian, 2007) and demand a higher processing load than shorter ones (Almor, 1999). Following neo-Gricean accounts...

Phonological models of intonation use abstract categories, such as pitch accents, to build a bridge between continuous modulations in f0 contours (on the substantial side) and post-lexical meaning (on the functional side). However, recent research on romance, Germanic and non-Indoeuropean languages shows that sentence modality contrasts (i.e. quest...

Much recent work on German and English intonation has addressed the impact of information structure on prosodic patterns in terms of the focus/background partition. In contrast with stress-accent languages such as Italian, Spanish or English, French does not appear to signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it appears to mainly exploit...

Though two levels of phrasing are generally accepted for French, a large degree of intra-speaker variability in the amount of preboundary lengthening is generally found within the lowest level (the Accentual Phrase or AP). A question that still remains to be answered is whether this source of variability is merely due to speech rate fluctuations or...

This article presents the nature and the implementation of prosodic representations. The prosodic structure is considered to be fundamentally different from the morphosyntactic structure in that it is crucially flatter. The work on the prosodic phrasing of European Portuguese (EP) has provided similar data to that reported for Korean. EP has been s...

This study addresses the question of the separate contribution of tonal and duration cues in prosodic boundary marking and their effect in syntactic parsing in French. We used pairs of Noun Phrases whose segmental structure was identical but differing in the potential placement of an Accentual Phrase (AP) or Intermediate Phrase (ip) boundary at the...

A basic constituent of French intonation is the Accentual Phrase (AP), which includes two distinct tonal events: a final LH* accentual rise and an initial LHi rise. A previous study had shown a difference between the rising movements according to the the position of the AP within the intonational phrase (IP): prenuclear (P, IP-initial) versus nucle...

Much recent work on German and English intonation has addressed the impact of information structure on prosodic patterns in terms of the focus/background partition. In contrast with stress-accent languages such as Italian, Spanish or English, French does not appear to signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it appears to mainly exploit...

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....

One of the most studied phonetic dimensions differentiating pitch accent categories is tonal alignment. However, when acoustic alignment data are broken down by individual patterns, one can notice great differences both in the size of the contrast as well as in the dispersion of the temporal values. Moreover, speakers appear to compensate for weake...

This study tested whether an Intermediate Phrase (ip) right boundary is interpreted by French listeners as cueing a major syntactic break (e.g. NounPhrase/Verb Phrase break) or also a weaker syntactic break (e.g. Noun Phrase internal boundary). Pairs of Noun Phrases, whose segmental structure was identical up to the sixth syllable, but differing in...

In the last 20-30 years, there have been numerous arguments from cognition, linguistics, and technology for assuming that the words, on one side, and the tonal specification of an utterance, on the other side, are stored and created independently of each other (Liberman 1978, Goldsmith 1979, Pierrehumbert 1980; see Ladd 2008 for a synthesis of the...

In this paper, we analyze data from Neapolitan Italian showing that register subordination within a prosodic phrase is function of information structure. Specifically, we hypothesized that in an SN VP structure, the register level of the separately phrased VP would be lowered when it is coextensive with a focus constituent immediately following a p...

Within the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation, there is only weak evidence for the existence of the intermediate phrase (ip) for French. Our proposal is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level is not merely linked to a specific focus or marked syntactic structure, while predicting that an alignment constraint (ALING-XP,R; ip,R...

In French, a phonological phrase (PP) can either be isomorphic with an accentual phrase (AP, [1]) or else be produced as two separate APs, when possible. The PP has also been recently found to be directly involved in lexical access processing [2], in that a PP boundary might remove a temporary lexical ambiguity. In a set of two experiments, we show...

Studies addressing prosodic constituency in French generally agree on two levels of phrasing (accentual phrase, AP, and intonation phrase, IP), while the existence of an intermediate level of phrasing (intermediate phrase, ip) is still controversial. In this study we examine durational cues in a read speech corpus at normal and fast rates in which...

In this paper we present data in Neapolitan Italian that show a clear phonological difference in intonation between a clitic left dislocated object topic in an exhaustive answer and in a partial answer. In the latter, the topic expression is set aside in its own prosodic phrase, made of a rising accent (H*) followed by a !H- boundary tone. An exhau...

The role of pitch pattern shape and perceptual target location is investigated here by means of an identification test involving two pitch accent categories in Pisa Italian. The perception test concerned the pitch accents used in contrastive and utterance-initial broad focus and was performed by asking subjects to identify two continua composed of...

This paper addresses the issue of tonal perception as it relates to special configurations, i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) plateaux. We here review a series of perceptual experiments in two different languages, Italian (Naples and Pisa variety) and German. A subset of the auditory stimuli employed in these studies contained a high F0 plateau, whic...

This study addresses the relationship between information structure and intonation in French. More specifically, it tests whether phrase-initial rises (LHi) are associated with the left edge of contrastively focused constituents in wh-interrogatives. Since LHi distribution has also been correlated with length, the study further examines the relativ...

The two experiments reported here support an analysis based on constraints which reflect the syntax-prosody interface. This analysis proves that the Intermediate Phrase (ip) exists in French. The ip is ranked higher than the Accentual Phrase and smaller than the Intonation Phrase in the prosodic hierarchy and it is not restricted to specific syntac...

The two experiments reported here support an analysis based on constraints which reflect the syntax-prosody interface. This analysis proves that the Intermediate Phrase (ip) exists in French. The ip is ranked higher than the Accentual Phrase and smaller than the Intonation Phrase in the prosodic hierarchy and it is not restricted to specific syntac...

Intonational variation is widely regarded as a source of information about the topic structure of spoken discourse. However, many factors other than topic can influence this variation. We compared two models of intonation in terms of their ability to account for these other sources of variation. In dealing with this variation, the models paint diff...

Tonal target detection is a very difficult task, especially in presence of consonantal perturbations. Though different detection methods have been adopted in tonal alignment research, we still do not know which is the most reliable. In our paper, we found that such methodological choices have serious theoretical implications. Interpretation of the...

Within the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Ladd, 1996), there is only weak evidence for the existence of the intermediate phrase (ip) for French. Our assumption is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level (ip) in French is not merely linked to a specific focus or marked syntactic structure and predict t...

The existence of an intermediate level of phrasing (ip) has been shown for several Germanic as well as Romance languages. There is some evidence for this intermediate level of phrasing in French even if its status is still controversial. Our assumption is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level (ip) in French is not simply linked to a...

Ce travail étudie la variabilité acoustique de la réalisation de la voyelle nasale en portugais brésilien provoqué par le contexte segmental droit. Spécifiquement, il s'avère qu'un murmure nasal perceptible est mesurable seulement quand la voyelle nasale précède une plosive, mais pas avant des fricatives. Selon une hypothèse alternative, il n'y aur...

In French, a phonological phrase (PP) can either be isomorphic with an accentual phrase (AP) or else be produced as two separate APs, when possible. The PP has also been recently found to be directly involved in lexical access processing, in that a PP boundary might remove a temporary lexical ambiguity. In a set of two experiments, we show here tha...