The perception of stress by Italian speakers

Abstract The present paper reports on a study concerning the perception of stress by Italian speakers. A total of 64 stimuli were constructed by means of a formant synthesizer, according to a pre-established pattern. Special care was devoted to the determination of duration, intensity and fundamental frequency values, which had to be assigned in turn (through a systematic permutation) to both syllables of the disyllabic word chosen for the test. This consisted in the phonemic sequence /papa/, which can give rise to two meaningful words in the Italian language, according to the position of pro-minance. The stimuli were presented in random order to two groups of listeners. The main set was composed of 52 Italian speakers from the north-west, whereas the second (control) group consisted of nine subjects from the north-east. Test responses, analysed in relation to the various parametric values present in each stimulus, consistently pointed to duration as the most effective prominence cue. The role of the other two acoustic components, together with some seemingly unexpected results, are discussed.