The exclamative sentence is a grammatical category used to convey a surprising effect. Among non-declarative sentences, the prosody of exclamatives has not received much attention. Previous works focused in particular on syntactic and semantic aspects. On the contrary, the literature on exclamative prosody is scarce. This paper investigates the exclamative intonation of the Cosenza Italian. A wide corpus of wh, non-wh and elliptic exclamatives was analysed, both phonetically and phonologically. The intonation patterns were analyzed according to the autosegmental-metrical framework. Results showed that all exclamatives have an extra high F0 contour and a wider pitch range with respect to declarative sentences; a remarkable lengthening of the final stressed syllable was observed too. The exclamative sentences exhibited a relevant prosodic characterization, coherently with its expressive status, always out of norms. The perceptual effect was both typical and distinctive; the prosodic features acted as linguistic indicators of illocutive force. The prosodic structure, in some way or another, conveyed semantic and pragmatic meanings. In the final part, some hypotheses on the possible correlation between pragmatic and prosodic components are put forth.

The present work intends to investigate the prosodic features of the exclamative sentences in Bari. Italian. To explore the intonation of exclamative sentences, we designed a corpus of twenty dialogic texts, each containing a target sentence. A group of 10 non-wh exclamatives was analysed in pairs with 10 assertive sentences while a group of 10 wh exclamatives was analysed in pairs with 10 yes/no questions. Each pairs of sentences was analyzed in parallel, both with their own assertive or interrogative version. The assumption is that the success of each speech act occur through the activation of specific prosodic factors. The interpretation of experimental data has been integrated with the results obtained by a perceptual identification test. A series of stimuli was obtained through separate and joint manipulation of duration and f0. The experimental findings prove that both duration and f0 work together in a synergic way. The research demonstrates how the covariation of prosodic indices may contribute to the recognition of the exclamative sentences

The present study deals with the linguistic production of four children with Down Syndrome (aged 6-10 years). Each subject was audiotaped during verbal elicitation tasks. Both phonological and morphological abilities of the children are described paying particular attention to consonantal system and to free-standing morphemes. Our study differs from previous Italian research on Down Syndrome: for the first time the phonological description is based on a spectrographic analysis. The acoustic results reveal high percentage of substitution, assimilation processes and cluster reduction. A relevant delay in phonological development, with more errors in the production of later-developing sounds, was observed. Articulatory imprecision can be directly attributed to the oral and facial anomalies; in addition, general hypotonia and specific oral motor problems affect the coordination and the timing of articulatory gestures. The findings of the morphological analysis confirm that children with Down Syndrome omit many grammatical morphemes demonstrating particular difficulty with the production of the functional categories such as: articles, clitics, prepositions and auxiliaries. They show a consistent speech disorder that causes a simplification of many linguistic structures. The omission is probably a sort of economy strategy: functional words are non semantic elements with scarce phonetic and prosodic weight.

What are the characteristics of the language of people with Down Syndrome? To which extent their linguistic manifestations may be considered exclusive? Can the study of pathological language to throw light on the mechanisms of acquisition and loss of the language faculty? In this monograph, the cognitive and neurological assessments are combined with a spettro-acustic methodology, an approach never applied so far in Italy for the analysis of speech of people with Down Syndrome. The phenomenology observed is interpreted according to the universal principles of language acquisition and typological markedness, the same principles working in unstable contexts, such as birth or death of a language. The book is aimed at those who are moving in the sciences of language. At the same time, it stands as a useful tool for those who work in contact with persons with Down syndrome or other forms of speech pathologies.

This manual is addressed to those people that want learn a good pronunciation of Italian language for professional purposes. The first part of volume is devoted to the description of relaxation techniques, a particular attention is given the complex dynamics of respiratory and speech phonation. The second part contains an outline of linguistics and articulatory phonetics. In particular, the section is focused on the relationship between graphemes and phonemes, as well as on the articulatory description of Italian vowels and consonants (this part is integrated by several explicative Figures). The geographical characteristics of pronunciation and a detailed analysis of the norms of diction of the most problematic Italian graphemes, namely <e>, <o>, <s> and <z> were also discussed. The manual is completed by several exercises and by a useful Dictionary of about 2000 lemmas phonetically transcripted according to IPA that provides the diction of high-frequency Italian words having normally a problematic pronunciation. Finally, a CD-Rom contains the audio recordings of many Italian words and sentences. It is an indispensable didactic tool for testing the self-evaluation of the progresses achieved over the time

In this study we will present the first acoustic analysis on Italian vowel system concerning adults with Down Syndrome. These subjects show scarce speech intelligibility and a remarkable alteration of phonological structure, as documented in the international literature. A large presence of phonetic errors has been already reported for Down people in many languages. Nevertheless, the phonetic aspects received little attention by researchers. In this regard, the acoustic vowel space of ten Italian young adults with Down Syndrome was investigated as compared to a control group of subjects with the same chronological age. Frequential values of the first two formants, and the Euclidian distance of each vowel to the Centroid were measured. Experimental findings showed, only for Down people, high rate of vowel errors and a reduced vowel space. The ellipses of vowels were always wide and strongly overlapped. The overlapping of formant distributions, particularly evident in connected speech, lowered the degree of intelligibility, determining a degraded speech production.