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Mario Vayra

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Papers by Mario Vayra

Le basi articolatorie della prominenza accentuale in italiano

by Claudio Zmarich and Mario Vayra

V. Giordani, V. Bruseghini, P. Cosi (a cura di), Scienze vocali e del linguaggio. Metodologie di valutazione e risorse linguistiche. Atti del III Convegno Nazionale AISV, Trento, 29-30/11-1/12/2006, EDK Editore srl, Torriana (RN), 2006, 185-200 [ISBN: 978-88-95112-69-5], 2006

Presentiamo in questa sede i primi risultati di una ricerca che mira a indagare come la variazion... more Presentiamo in questa sede i primi risultati di una ricerca che mira a indagare come la variazione segmentale in italiano è condizionata dalla prosodia, focalizzandoci sulle variazioni indotte dall’accento e prendendo in considerazione le proprietà acustiche ed articolatorie delle sillabe che sono prominenti ai diversi livelli della gerarchia prosodica. A questo scopo abbiamo analizzato la cinematica del movimento labiale di due soggetti adulti di sesso femminile nella produzione di sillabe aperte (CV) caratterizzate da tre livelli di prominenza: nessun accento (sillabe atone), accento lessicale (sillabe toniche), accento lessicale e intonativo (sillabe toniche in focus contrastivo). Lo scopo ultimo è indagare sull’origine e sulla natura delle variazioni di durata indotte dall’accento. I risultati cinematici sono interpretati all’interno della Task Dynamics, il modello quantitativo che implementa le unità fonologiche postulate dalla Articulatory Phonology (cfr., ad es., Browman & Goldstein, 1990; 1992; 2000) entro il sistema di produzione linguistica (cfr., ad es., Saltzman & Munhall, 1989; Saltzman & Byrd, 2000)

3. Glottologia_2015-16_Linguaggio e Comunicazione

Perceiving through the Lens of Native Phonetics: Italian and Danish Listeners' Perception of English Consonant Contrasts

International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2011

CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics Collana CLUB WORKING PAPERS IN LINGUISTICS (CLUB-WPL)

nel 2015 con l'obiettivo di riunire coloro che, all'interno dell'Alma Mater, svolgono... more nel 2015 con l'obiettivo di riunire coloro che, all'interno dell'Alma Mater, svolgono attività di ricerca in ambito linguistico. Il CLUB organizza ogni anno un ciclo di seminari e pubblica una selezione degli interventi nella collana CLUB WORKING PAPERS IN LINGUISTICS. I volumi, sottoposti a una procedura di peer-review, sono pubblicati online sulla piattaforma AMS Acta dell'Università di Bologna e sono liberamente accessibili.

Accenting Deaccenting and Information Structure in Italian Dialogues

Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly ... more Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly mentioning the same entity within a task-oriented dialogue. Contrary to what is expected in Germanic languages, results show that the vast majority of the repeated mentions are accented irrespective of their being hearer/discourse given or discourse segment given.

A Sound Approach to Language Matters

AU Library Scholarly Publishing Services, 2019

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, col... more The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters.

Focus ristretto e focus contrastivo in italiano

E&#x27;stato scritto recentemente che i termini &#x27;contrasto&#x27;,&#x27;focus... more E&#x27;stato scritto recentemente che i termini &#x27;contrasto&#x27;,&#x27;focus&#x27;,&#x27;topic&#x27;,&#x27;tema&#x27;costituiscono un campo minato dal punto di vista terminologico ed hanno ostacolato per anni la ricerca in pragmatica ed entro la teoria del discorso (Vallduvì e Vilkuna, 1998: 80). In anni recenti ...

Accentazione, Deaccentazione e Struttura Informativa

... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 ti... more ... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 tipi diversi di coppie di frasi asserzione-risposta i locutori francesi, italiani e spagnoli favoriscono la ri-accentazione dell&#x27;informazione ripetuta, mentre quelli di altre altre lingue (russo, greco ...

[Italian] L2 Spoken Discourse: Pragmatic and Prosodic Aspects

L'opera, comprese tutte le sue parti, è tutelata dalla legge sui diritti d'autore. Sono vietate e... more L'opera, comprese tutte le sue parti, è tutelata dalla legge sui diritti d'autore. Sono vietate e sanzionate (se non espressamente autorizzate) la riproduzione in ogni modo e forma (comprese le fotocopie, la scansione, la memorizzazione elettronica) e la comunicazione (ivi inclusi a titolo esemplificativo ma non esaustivo: la distribuzione, l'adattamento, la traduzione e la rielaborazione, anche a mezzo di canali digitali interattivi e con qualsiasi modalità attualmente nota od in futuro sviluppata). Le fotocopie per uso personale del lettore possono essere effettuate nei limiti del 15% di ciascun fascicolo dietro pagamento alla SIAE del compenso previsto dall'art. 68, commi 4 e 5, della legge 22 aprile 1941 n. 633. Le fotocopie effettuate per finalità di carattere professionale, economico o commerciale o comunque per uso diverso da quello personale, possono essere effettuate a seguito di specifica autorizzazione rilasciata da CLEARedi, Centro Licenze e Autorizzazioni per le Riproduzioni Editoriali

Patterns of temporal compression in spoken Italian

On the Articulatory Bases of Prominence in Italian

This study reports the first results of a research aimed to investigate how segmental variation i... more This study reports the first results of a research aimed to investigate how segmental variation is conditioned by prosody in Italian, by examining the acoustic and articulatory properties of syllables that are prominent at different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. We examined lip movement kinematics of unstressed, stressed and nuclearly accented syllables in order to understand the kinematic characteristics of accent-induced articulatory strenghthening. The kinematic results are then interpreted within a Task Dynamics model to evaluate how prosodically-driven variation can be accounted for by a particular dynamical parameter setting in a mass-spring gestural model.

Broad, narrow and contrastive focus in Florentine Italian

It is well established that focus may have prosodic reflexes in various languages. Previous data ... more It is well established that focus may have prosodic reflexes in various languages. Previous data on Florentine Italian showed that broad focus and late narrow-contrastive focus utterances are marked by different pitch accents. With the present experiment we address the question whether a three way contrast exists in the intonational realization of broad, narrow-semantic and narrow-contrastive focus. Results show that while focus type (contrastive vs. noncontrastive) is signalled by different pitch accents, differences in focus scope (broad vs. narrow) are not.

All’interfaccia tra prosodia e struttura informativa. La realizzazione prosodica dell’informazione data in tedesco e in italiano L2

On the Phonetic Bases of Vowel-Consonant Coordination in Italian : A Study of Stress and "Compensatory Shortening

This study focuses on the temporal organization of consonants and vowels in Italian, ostensibly a... more This study focuses on the temporal organization of consonants and vowels in Italian, ostensibly a syllable-timed language. It aims to reveal the articulatory origins of a class of acoustic shortening phenomena known as "compensatory.Ó We compared durations and first formant trajectories of /a/ in two compensatory contexts: 1) stressed /a/ in open vs. closed syllables; 2) stressed /a/ followed by one or two unstressed syllables. In addition, we measured /a/ in a prosodically different shortening context: stressed vs. unstressed position. We found that in Italian (as in English) shortening of a vowel before a tautosyllabic consonant is due to truncation by the closing gesture for the consonant. However, shortening due to destressing involves global reduction of the opening gesture for the vowel, evident from the beginning of the gesture. The similarity between these findings and those on English suggests a fundamental similarity in this aspect of their timing profiles. 1. INTRODU...

Perceiving through the Lens of Native Phonetics: Italian and Danish Listeners' Perception of English Consonant Contrasts

This study examined how the phonetic details of the phonological systems for two different native... more This study examined how the phonetic details of the phonological systems for two different nativelanguage listener groups interact with their perception of the phonetic details of three nonnative consonant contrasts. Current theoretical models of cross-language and second language speech perception are evaluated by relating native Italian and native Danish listeners’ perceptual assimilation of audio tokens of English /b v w ð/ 1 to how well the two groups discriminate the corresponding English contrasts /b/-/v/, /w/-/v/, and /ð/-/v/. Results indicate some support for the models, but also performance differences between the groups that are unexpected by any existing models. Implications for existing hypotheses about non-native speech perception are discussed.

Accentazione, deaccentazione e struttura informativa

... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 ti... more ... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 tipi diversi di coppie di frasi asserzione-risposta i locutori francesi, italiani e spagnoli favoriscono la ri-accentazione dell&#x27;informazione ripetuta, mentre quelli di altre altre lingue (russo, greco ...

Accenting Deaccenting and Information Structure in Italian Dialogue

Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly ... more Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly mentioning the same entity within a task-oriented dialogue. Contrary to what is expected in Germanic languages, results show that the vast majority of the repeated mentions are accented irrespective of their being hearer/discourse given or discourse segment given .

7. Glottologia_2015-16-Linguistica storica_2.pdf

Phonetic details of coronal consonants in the Italian spoken by Italian-Australians from two areas of Veneto

The paper investigates the distribution and the phonetic details of a set of coronal obstruents i... more The paper investigates the distribution and the phonetic details of a set of coronal obstruents in the speech of Veneto immigrants who arrived in Australia more than 50 years ago in order to understand how they negotiate the languages that form their linguistic repertoire. We focus on their L2-Veneto Regional Italian, with the aim of ascertaining whether it has crystallized at the stage it was at the time they left Italy; whether it shows signs of attrition due to replacement of features from the L1-dialect or from L3-English; or whether it shows signs of koinization due to the contact with other dialects and regional varieties of Italian. Results on coronal obstruent distribution based on narrow phonetic transcriptions and on their acoustic characteristics (spectral moments analysis) show a change in progress in the fricative set and a general maintenance of the stop consonants’ phonetic features. Individual differences in language change are discussed in light of both internal (li...

6.1 Acquisizione_2014_gw.pdf

Le basi articolatorie della prominenza accentuale in italiano

by Claudio Zmarich and Mario Vayra

V. Giordani, V. Bruseghini, P. Cosi (a cura di), Scienze vocali e del linguaggio. Metodologie di valutazione e risorse linguistiche. Atti del III Convegno Nazionale AISV, Trento, 29-30/11-1/12/2006, EDK Editore srl, Torriana (RN), 2006, 185-200 [ISBN: 978-88-95112-69-5], 2006

Presentiamo in questa sede i primi risultati di una ricerca che mira a indagare come la variazion... more Presentiamo in questa sede i primi risultati di una ricerca che mira a indagare come la variazione segmentale in italiano è condizionata dalla prosodia, focalizzandoci sulle variazioni indotte dall’accento e prendendo in considerazione le proprietà acustiche ed articolatorie delle sillabe che sono prominenti ai diversi livelli della gerarchia prosodica. A questo scopo abbiamo analizzato la cinematica del movimento labiale di due soggetti adulti di sesso femminile nella produzione di sillabe aperte (CV) caratterizzate da tre livelli di prominenza: nessun accento (sillabe atone), accento lessicale (sillabe toniche), accento lessicale e intonativo (sillabe toniche in focus contrastivo). Lo scopo ultimo è indagare sull’origine e sulla natura delle variazioni di durata indotte dall’accento. I risultati cinematici sono interpretati all’interno della Task Dynamics, il modello quantitativo che implementa le unità fonologiche postulate dalla Articulatory Phonology (cfr., ad es., Browman & Goldstein, 1990; 1992; 2000) entro il sistema di produzione linguistica (cfr., ad es., Saltzman & Munhall, 1989; Saltzman & Byrd, 2000)

3. Glottologia_2015-16_Linguaggio e Comunicazione

Perceiving through the Lens of Native Phonetics: Italian and Danish Listeners' Perception of English Consonant Contrasts

International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2011

CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics Collana CLUB WORKING PAPERS IN LINGUISTICS (CLUB-WPL)

nel 2015 con l'obiettivo di riunire coloro che, all'interno dell'Alma Mater, svolgono... more nel 2015 con l'obiettivo di riunire coloro che, all'interno dell'Alma Mater, svolgono attività di ricerca in ambito linguistico. Il CLUB organizza ogni anno un ciclo di seminari e pubblica una selezione degli interventi nella collana CLUB WORKING PAPERS IN LINGUISTICS. I volumi, sottoposti a una procedura di peer-review, sono pubblicati online sulla piattaforma AMS Acta dell'Università di Bologna e sono liberamente accessibili.

Accenting Deaccenting and Information Structure in Italian Dialogues

Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly ... more Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly mentioning the same entity within a task-oriented dialogue. Contrary to what is expected in Germanic languages, results show that the vast majority of the repeated mentions are accented irrespective of their being hearer/discourse given or discourse segment given.

A Sound Approach to Language Matters

AU Library Scholarly Publishing Services, 2019

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, col... more The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters.

Focus ristretto e focus contrastivo in italiano

E&#x27;stato scritto recentemente che i termini &#x27;contrasto&#x27;,&#x27;focus... more E&#x27;stato scritto recentemente che i termini &#x27;contrasto&#x27;,&#x27;focus&#x27;,&#x27;topic&#x27;,&#x27;tema&#x27;costituiscono un campo minato dal punto di vista terminologico ed hanno ostacolato per anni la ricerca in pragmatica ed entro la teoria del discorso (Vallduvì e Vilkuna, 1998: 80). In anni recenti ...

Accentazione, Deaccentazione e Struttura Informativa

... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 ti... more ... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 tipi diversi di coppie di frasi asserzione-risposta i locutori francesi, italiani e spagnoli favoriscono la ri-accentazione dell&#x27;informazione ripetuta, mentre quelli di altre altre lingue (russo, greco ...

[Italian] L2 Spoken Discourse: Pragmatic and Prosodic Aspects

L'opera, comprese tutte le sue parti, è tutelata dalla legge sui diritti d'autore. Sono vietate e... more L'opera, comprese tutte le sue parti, è tutelata dalla legge sui diritti d'autore. Sono vietate e sanzionate (se non espressamente autorizzate) la riproduzione in ogni modo e forma (comprese le fotocopie, la scansione, la memorizzazione elettronica) e la comunicazione (ivi inclusi a titolo esemplificativo ma non esaustivo: la distribuzione, l'adattamento, la traduzione e la rielaborazione, anche a mezzo di canali digitali interattivi e con qualsiasi modalità attualmente nota od in futuro sviluppata). Le fotocopie per uso personale del lettore possono essere effettuate nei limiti del 15% di ciascun fascicolo dietro pagamento alla SIAE del compenso previsto dall'art. 68, commi 4 e 5, della legge 22 aprile 1941 n. 633. Le fotocopie effettuate per finalità di carattere professionale, economico o commerciale o comunque per uso diverso da quello personale, possono essere effettuate a seguito di specifica autorizzazione rilasciata da CLEARedi, Centro Licenze e Autorizzazioni per le Riproduzioni Editoriali

Patterns of temporal compression in spoken Italian

On the Articulatory Bases of Prominence in Italian

This study reports the first results of a research aimed to investigate how segmental variation i... more This study reports the first results of a research aimed to investigate how segmental variation is conditioned by prosody in Italian, by examining the acoustic and articulatory properties of syllables that are prominent at different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. We examined lip movement kinematics of unstressed, stressed and nuclearly accented syllables in order to understand the kinematic characteristics of accent-induced articulatory strenghthening. The kinematic results are then interpreted within a Task Dynamics model to evaluate how prosodically-driven variation can be accounted for by a particular dynamical parameter setting in a mass-spring gestural model.

Broad, narrow and contrastive focus in Florentine Italian

It is well established that focus may have prosodic reflexes in various languages. Previous data ... more It is well established that focus may have prosodic reflexes in various languages. Previous data on Florentine Italian showed that broad focus and late narrow-contrastive focus utterances are marked by different pitch accents. With the present experiment we address the question whether a three way contrast exists in the intonational realization of broad, narrow-semantic and narrow-contrastive focus. Results show that while focus type (contrastive vs. noncontrastive) is signalled by different pitch accents, differences in focus scope (broad vs. narrow) are not.

All’interfaccia tra prosodia e struttura informativa. La realizzazione prosodica dell’informazione data in tedesco e in italiano L2

On the Phonetic Bases of Vowel-Consonant Coordination in Italian : A Study of Stress and "Compensatory Shortening

This study focuses on the temporal organization of consonants and vowels in Italian, ostensibly a... more This study focuses on the temporal organization of consonants and vowels in Italian, ostensibly a syllable-timed language. It aims to reveal the articulatory origins of a class of acoustic shortening phenomena known as "compensatory.Ó We compared durations and first formant trajectories of /a/ in two compensatory contexts: 1) stressed /a/ in open vs. closed syllables; 2) stressed /a/ followed by one or two unstressed syllables. In addition, we measured /a/ in a prosodically different shortening context: stressed vs. unstressed position. We found that in Italian (as in English) shortening of a vowel before a tautosyllabic consonant is due to truncation by the closing gesture for the consonant. However, shortening due to destressing involves global reduction of the opening gesture for the vowel, evident from the beginning of the gesture. The similarity between these findings and those on English suggests a fundamental similarity in this aspect of their timing profiles. 1. INTRODU...

Perceiving through the Lens of Native Phonetics: Italian and Danish Listeners' Perception of English Consonant Contrasts

This study examined how the phonetic details of the phonological systems for two different native... more This study examined how the phonetic details of the phonological systems for two different nativelanguage listener groups interact with their perception of the phonetic details of three nonnative consonant contrasts. Current theoretical models of cross-language and second language speech perception are evaluated by relating native Italian and native Danish listeners’ perceptual assimilation of audio tokens of English /b v w ð/ 1 to how well the two groups discriminate the corresponding English contrasts /b/-/v/, /w/-/v/, and /ð/-/v/. Results indicate some support for the models, but also performance differences between the groups that are unexpected by any existing models. Implications for existing hypotheses about non-native speech perception are discussed.

Accentazione, deaccentazione e struttura informativa

... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 ti... more ... Cinzia Avesani , **Mario Vayra, **Daniela Banelli, °Maria ... Cruttenden dimostra che in 4 tipi diversi di coppie di frasi asserzione-risposta i locutori francesi, italiani e spagnoli favoriscono la ri-accentazione dell&#x27;informazione ripetuta, mentre quelli di altre altre lingue (russo, greco ...

Accenting Deaccenting and Information Structure in Italian Dialogue

Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly ... more Do Italian speakers deaccent given information? In this study we examined word tokens repeatedly mentioning the same entity within a task-oriented dialogue. Contrary to what is expected in Germanic languages, results show that the vast majority of the repeated mentions are accented irrespective of their being hearer/discourse given or discourse segment given .

7. Glottologia_2015-16-Linguistica storica_2.pdf

Phonetic details of coronal consonants in the Italian spoken by Italian-Australians from two areas of Veneto

The paper investigates the distribution and the phonetic details of a set of coronal obstruents i... more The paper investigates the distribution and the phonetic details of a set of coronal obstruents in the speech of Veneto immigrants who arrived in Australia more than 50 years ago in order to understand how they negotiate the languages that form their linguistic repertoire. We focus on their L2-Veneto Regional Italian, with the aim of ascertaining whether it has crystallized at the stage it was at the time they left Italy; whether it shows signs of attrition due to replacement of features from the L1-dialect or from L3-English; or whether it shows signs of koinization due to the contact with other dialects and regional varieties of Italian. Results on coronal obstruent distribution based on narrow phonetic transcriptions and on their acoustic characteristics (spectral moments analysis) show a change in progress in the fricative set and a general maintenance of the stop consonants’ phonetic features. Individual differences in language change are discussed in light of both internal (li...

6.1 Acquisizione_2014_gw.pdf