Psycholinguistic investigation of the prosody of wh-exclamatives and wh-questions
Résumé
Our main contribution to the workshop is to present the results of a perception experiment on prosody, based on reaction time measurements in an identification task. For this matter, we will use a user-friendly open source script that exploits Pygame (a module for Python) which allows an outsourcing of the experiments from the research center to the home office of the participants. The theoretical issue addressed here concerns morpho-syntactically identical root wh-questions and wh-exclamatives in Italian in (1): (1) Quanti panini hai preparato!/? how many sandwiches have prepared 'How many sandwiches you have made! (exclamative interpretation) How many sandwiches have you made? (question interpretation)' According to Portner & Zanuttini 2003, wh-exclamatives and wh-questions have the same semantics, namely they denote a set of propositions and have an existential presupposition. In this paper, we test whether wh-exclamatives and wh-questions in Italian can be distinguished by means of prosody. We investigate the existence of specific prosodic features, which might be used both at the production and perception level in order to differentiate between exclamatives and questions. In production, we mainly examined the intonation contour and the duration pattern of both sentence types. The experiment consists in a reading task on five speakers from the Southern Italin variety spoken in Cosenza. We found sentence type differences in the tonal composition and at the durational level. In the prenuclear section, a higher H target on the wh-word quanti was observed in both sentence types (but is is analyzed as %H in exclamatives and H* in interrogatives). A nuclear rise was only in wh-exclamatives, while a fall was typical of wh-questions. At the durational level, the stressed syllable on the noun and on the participle is significantly longer in the exclamative sentence type. As to phrase boundary differences, some speakers (mostly female) produced a terminal f0 rise in questions in contrast to the terminal f0 fall in exclamatives. Concerning the perception of the sentence types, we have been carrying out a perception test in which stimuli were presented by means of open-source and user-friendly python based toolkit. Subjects were asked to identify the sentence type of non-manipulated utterance as a wh-question or wh-exclamative as soon as possible. We simultaneously measured reaction times of the identification judgements. Our hypothesis is that listeners use prosodic (phonological/phonetic) information in order to differentiate the two sentence types. Moreover, if phonetic cues located in prenuclear section of the contour matter, listeners should be able to identify the two sentence types even before hearing the nucleus. When listening to the nucleus, identification scores will be higher and RT will be faster, since the nuclear contour contains information about sentence type differences.