According to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), acoustic similarity/dissimilarity between sounds of the second language (L2) and the native language (L1) governs L2 learnability in adulthood and predicts L2 sound perception by naïve listeners. The study addressed two questions: (1) whether the discrimination patterns predicted by the PAM for L2 naïve listeners are also reflected in the modulation of Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component of the event-related response (ERP) and (2) whether L2 classroom learning is associated with the typology of L2 naïve listeners, as recently suggested by behavioral studies on cross-linguistic research. We measured the behavioral and ERP responses in two groups (10 subjects per group) of Salento Italian (SI) undergraduate students of British English (BE) attending the first the fifth year of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Faculty, compared with 10 inexperienced subjects of BE as L2 (only for the ERP experiment). An identification test examined the perceived phonetic distance between the L1 (/i, ɛ, a, ɔ, u/) and L2 (/iː, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ʌ, ɑː, ɒ, ɜː, ɔː, ʊ, uː/) vowel system. The contrasts /iː/-/uː/ and /æ/-/ʌ/ (for which the PAM’s framework predicted an excellent and a good discrimination, respectively) were selected for an oddity discrimination test and the ERP experiment. In the ERP experiment, using an oddball paradigm, the contrasts /iː/-/uː/ and /æ/ -/ʌ/ were tested while subjects watched a silent movie. As a control condition we introduced the L1 within-category contrast /ɛ/-[e] for which poor discrimination is predicted for all subjects. Following the PAM predictions, the two groups of students did not differ in their behavioral discrimination performance: they exhibited excellent discrimination of /iː/-/uː/ and moderate to good discrimination of /æ/-/ʌ/. MMN amplitudes confirmed that the L2 contrasts were well discriminated. Crucially, no difference was found between the groups of students and the inexperienced group for the L2 contrasts /iː/-/uː/ and /æ/-/ʌ/, and, as predicted, all the subjects showed poor discrimination for the L1 within-category contrast. MMN peak latencies were modulated by the contrast type: /i/-/u/ elicited a faster MMN than /æ/-/ʌ/ and /ɛ/-[e]; in turn, /æ/-/ʌ/ evoked a faster MMN than /ɛ/-[e], reflecting the acoustic distance between the stimuli. Furthermore, the MMN was right lateralized. In line with the PAM model, we extend the findings of previous behavioral studies showing that, at the psychophysiological level, classroom instruction in adulthood relies on assimilation of L2 vowels to L1 phoneme categories and does not trigger improvement in L2 phonetic discrimination.

According to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), articulatory similarity/dissimilarity between sounds of the second language (L2) and the native language (L1) governs L2 learnability in adulthood and predicts L2 sound perception by naïve listeners. We performed behavioral and neurophysiological experiments on two groups of university students at the first and fifth years of the English language curriculum and on a group of naïve listeners. Categorization and discrimination tests, as well as the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response to L2 sound changes, showed that the discriminatory capabilities of the students did not significantly differ from those of the naïve subjects. In line with the PAM model, we extend the findings of previous behavioral studies showing that, at the neural level, classroom instruction in adulthood relies on assimilation of L2 vowels to L1 phoneme categories and does not trigger improvement in L2 phonetic discrimination.

Lo studio delle consonanti scempie e geminate rappresenta un’ottima opportunità per confrontare il comportamento di soggetti colpiti da Morbo di Parkinson e soggetti di controllo rispetto ad un compito linguistico che può fornire dati interessanti di per sé, circa la resistenza del contrasto linguistico nel parlato patologico, e anche in relazione ai modelli teorici per la coordinazione inter-gestuale. L’obiettivo principale di questo lavoro è verificare se i gesti articolatori di soggetti affetti da Morbo di Parkinson mostrino alterazioni rispetto ai gesti di soggetti non affetti dal Morbo, sia in termini spaziali che temporali, prendendo in considerazione in modo particolare: 1) la realizzazione del contrasto tra consonanti scempie e geminate; 2) la sonorità e il modo di articolazione delle consonanti; 3) il fatto che l’età dei soggetti vari e possa influire sia sulla durata che sull’ampiezza dei gesti (con ovvie ricadute sul piano acustico). In generale, i risultati sulle consonati scempie e geminate sono in linea con i precedenti (Gili Fivela e Zmarich 2005, Zmarich e Gili Fivela 2005) e aggiungono informazioni circa i gesti linguali. Inoltre, circa l’effetto della patologia, è stato confermato che i soggetti patologici presentano spesso valori ridotti per le misure considerate, fatto salvo ciò che riguarda l’articolatore linguale e lo spostamento sull’asse antero-posteriore. Anche in questo caso, i risultati sono quindi in linea con la letteratura precedente (per l’italiano, Gili Fivela et al. 2014, Iraci et al. in stampa). L’influenza della sonorità e del modo di articolazione, risulta abbastanza chiara e in linea con le attese almeno per quanto riguarda il primo fattore, in relazione alla presenza di consonanti bilabiali sonore rafforzate (Romano, 2003, Gaillard-Corvaglia & Kamiyama 2006). Per quanto riguarda il modo di articolazione, la maggior complessità articolatoria prevista per le nasali non si esprime per mezzo di incremento generalizzato dei valori delle misure considerate o, almeno, l’eventuale incremento è minore di quello osservato per le occlusive nel loro complesso (quindi incluse le sonore). Circa l’effetto del fattore età, nel complesso abbiamo riscontrato dati coerenti con quelli descritti da Xue e Hao (2003) e in parte ritrovati in Gili Fivela et al. (2014), per cui i parlanti più anziani tendono a differire dagli altri (Xue e Hao 2003). Benché nel nostro caso anche i parlanti più giovani siano in realtà dei sessantacinquenni, le modificazioni osservate sono comunque coerenti con l’incremento dei valori nelle produzioni di coloro che hanno un’età più avanzata, ossia anche per i parlanti di età intermedia che di fatto hanno 74-75 anni. Tuttavia, dal momento che il raggruppamento per età accorpa soggetti patologici e di controllo nei tre livelli di età considerati, è ipotizzabile un’influenza della patologia sull’andamento di questi risultati (per una discussione, cfr. Iraci et al., in stampa). Infine, per quanto riguarda il phasing, i risultati ottenuti confermano quanto osservato da Gili Fivela et al. 2007 e Zmarich et al. 2007, 2009, 2011, ossia che la coordinazione inter-gestuale per scempie e geminate è coerente con un modello ibrido tra quello di Ӧhman e quello di Browman e Goldstein. A questo riguardo, la patologia sembra modificare in vario modo le significatività osservate nella popolazione di soggetti di controllo, ad indicare il fatto che sono necessarie altre analisi per comprendere appieno quali siano le differenze cruciali che interessano il parlato nel Morbo di Parkinson rispetto al parlato non patologico. In ogni caso, l’indagine descritta è preliminare e i risultati dovranno quindi essere verificati tramite ulteriori analisi.

Questo articolo presenta una sintesi sulla fonetica forense, focalizzando l'attenzione sul problema della comparazione di registrazioni vocali, nella quale un campione intercettato della voce del reo (anonimo) viene comparato con il campione registrato della voce del sospettato o dei sospettati (saggio). Dopo aver discusso i principi fondamentali della fonetica acustica, il presente lavoro pone l'accento sul perché metodi non scientifici, come quello dell'impronta vocale, non siano più accettati dalla comunità scientifica, che si sta invece orientando verso metodi tecnico-scientifici, implementati da software specializzati: nell'ambito di tali metodi, viene infine illustrato quello basato sull'approccio bayesiano e sul calcolo del rapporto di verosimiglianza (Likelihood ratio) per il confronto delle distribuzioni statistiche delle frequenze formantiche e della frequenza fondamentale.

Italian shows large phonetic and prosodic variation that depends on the geographical and dialectal area the speakers come from. The chapter explicitly focuses on the intonational variation occurring in Italian and offers 1) the key elements of a shared transcription system able to take it into account and 2) an overview of the intonation patterns of thirteen varieties, spoken in cities and towns located in various areas of the Italian peninsula, i.e. Milan, Turin, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Rome, Pescara, Naples, Salerno, Cosenza, Bari, and Lecce. The main novelty in the paper is the clear and explicit effort made in offering analyses and transcriptions keeping always in mind cross-variety comparison, to finally facilitate cross-language comparison as well. Importantly, it is the first work on Italian in which this is systematically done on the basis of a wide and representative set of sentence types, as well as on a quite large set of varieties.

The paper discusses results of four perception experiments run to figure out, in the first place, if different members of a pitch accent category are equally good in representing the category and its meaning and, in the second place, if one exemplar may work as perceptual magnet, affecting the perception of category’s members as already shown for vowels (Perceptual Magnet Effect). The idea behind the paper is that intonation categories may show peculiar characteristics, due to the variety of meanings conveyed and functions performed by intonation. Two pitch accents found in Pisa Italian are investigated by means of a set of experiments explicitly designed to study the Perceptual Magnet Effect, including an identification, a goodness rating and a discrimination test. The results show that it is possible to identify a best and a worst exemplar, a prototype and a non-prototype for each category, although this may not be enough to observe a Perceptual Magnet Effect. It is then argued that a possible explanation for this result is that members of an intonation category may communicate various nuances of the meaning expressed by the category and the subject’s sensitivity to these shades of meaning may disfavor the consistency of results that point to the perceptual attraction played by the prototype of an intonation category; in fact, differences between members could be perceived depending on the slightly different interpretation the subject may make when judging them. Therefore a final context matching goodness rating test is described, in which a context calling for a strong or a weak interpretation of the category meaning is given and subjects are asked to rate the way category’s members match the two given interpretations. The results show that members of intonational categories may be judged as variably appropriated to represent different shades of the meaning expressed by a category. Apart from being the first work on prototypes of intonational categories in Italian and one of the very few investigations on prototypes of intonational categories in general, the paper underlines the difficulty in pinning down meaning in order to exercise the appropriate control on subject interpretation during perception experiments. In particular, it shows that the reference to the main category meaning during perception experiments may disfavor the emergence of a clear Perceptual Magnet Effect. In this respect the results suggest that presenting stimuli with an associated pragmatic context may indeed restrict the potential interpretations, possibly favoring a greater consistency of the results.

The AG500 electromagnetic articulograph is widely used to reconstruct the movements of the articulatory organs. Nevertheless, some anomalies in its performance have been observed. It is well known that accuracy of the device is affected by electromagnetic interference and possible hardware failures or damage to the sensors. In this study, after eliminating any hardware or electromagnetic source of disturbance, a set of trials was carried out. The tests prove that anomalies in sensor position tracking are systematic in certain regions within the recording volume and, more importantly, show a specific pattern that can be clearly attributed to a wrong convergence of the calculation method.

This paper investigates the relevance of three prosodic parameters (alignment, duration and scaling) in the conveyance of contrastive focus in Catalan, Italian and Spanish. In particular, we seek to determine how the Effort Code is instantiated in the expression of contrastive focus in both production and perception. According to the Effort Code, putting more effort into speech production will lead to greater articulatory precision (de Jong 1995, Gussenhoven 2004) and this is related to the expression of focus in the sense that wider pitch excursions will be used to signal meanings that are relevant from an informational point of view. A dual production and perception experiment based on an identification task was conducted. Results for the production part show that contrastive focus accents have earlier peaks for all three languages but f0 peaks are systematically lower only in Italian. Syllables bearing the contrastive focus accents are also longer in the three languages. Regarding the results for the perception part, converging evidence is found not only for an active perceptual use of the three prosodic parameters present in production but also for language-specific preferences for particular prosodic parameters.

The paper offers various proposals on methods for investigating the perception of L2 intonation. Indeed, it is first motivated by the observation of a lack of discussion on this topic, which is clearly related to the absence of models on the perception of L2 intonation. In fact, existing models of L2 perception basically focus on phonemes, that is vocalic and consonantal segments, and the very few investigations related to the perception of suprasegmentals account for the perception of tones used in tonal languages rather than for the perception of intonation. In the first part, the paper offers a review of models, hypotheses and methods found in the literature on the perception of L2 phonemes and of L1 intonation categories. The goal of the review is to point out which methods and hypotheses can be useful for investigating the perception of intonation in L2 and if they need to be adapted for such purpose. In the second part of the paper, a brief summary is offered of an experiment to check if Italian-L1 subjects detect functional differences in English-L2 in the case such differences are conveyed by pitch accents phonetically, but not functionally, similar to L1 pitch accents. The description of main aspects concerning experimental design and results aims to highlight the contribution of the assumptions and methodological integrations suggested in the first part of the paper. In particular, it aims to show that: 1) integrating methods and usual practices found in the literature on perception of L2 phonemes and L1 intonation gives interesting results in the investigation of L2 intonation (as shown by reaction time measurements), although, in some cases, methodological adjustments are needed (e.g., splitting oddity discrimination tests); 2) results are consistent with the predictions of degrees of difficulties in discrimination that depend on the phonetic (and functional) features of L1 and L2 intonational patterns, similarly to what proposed by Best’s PAM model for phonemes.

The linguistic feature of intensity, lying “at the heart of social and emotional expression” (Labov 1984: 43), is significantly intertwined with politeness. In relation with intensity (that is, both upgrading and downgrading), the role of context and prosody in modifying and expressing politeness is discussed here in a pragmatic perspective. The complex interplay between intensity, politeness and prosody is explored with reference to several examples related to Italian, showing both the crucial role of prosody in conveying politeness and intensity and the relevance of global and local context parameters. In the paper, prosody acts as a pivot, with regard to which we discuss the status of the other components. In particular, it is shown to play an important role in constructing politeness and its variations of intensity under the influence of contextual parameter. Prosody may perform a primary distinctive function, or may, jointly with other convergent or divergent cues, express the meaning and politeness intended by the speaker. However, the overall effect of a speech act in terms of politeness is shown to be due to the variegated intertwinement between context, intensity and prosody, which is at play with or without other linguistic forms of politeness and accounts for the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between politeness and single utterance features.

Contents: Content and Language Integrated Learning E-Learning Solutions for Language Teaching and Learning ICT Based Language Teaching and Learning approaches Language Learning to Support International Mobility Language for Specific Purposes Monitoring and Evaluation of Language Teaching and Learning Multilingualism Quality and Innovation in Language Teaching and Learning Recognition and Validation of Language Skills Studies in Second Language Acquisition PIXEL was established in Florence in 1999 by a team of professionals with over 10 years of experience in the education and training sector, developed mainly in the framework of transnational cooperation. PIXEL’s mission is to promote an innovative approach to education, training and culture, based on the best experiences developed at European level.