An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

Abstract

We examined whether typically developing Italian children exhibit adult-like stress contrastivity for word productions elicited via a picture naming task (n=25 children aged 3–5 years and 27 adults). Stimuli were 10 trisyllabic Italian words; half began with a weak–strong (WS) pattern of lexical stress across the initial 2 syllables, as in patata, while the other half began with a strong–weak (SW) pattern, as in gomito. Word productions that were identified as correct via perceptual judgement were analysed acoustically. The initial 2 syllables of each correct word production were analysed in terms of the duration, peak intensity, and peak fundamental frequency of the vowels using a relative measure of contrast—the normalised pairwise variability index (PVI). Results across the majority of measures showed that children’s stress contrastivity was adult-like. However, the data revealed that children’s contrastivity for trisyllabic words beginning with a WS pattern was not adult-like regarding the PVI for vowel duration: children showed less contrastivity than adults. This effect appeared to be driven by differences in word-medial gemination between children and adults. Results are compared with data from a recent acoustic study of stress contrastivity in English speaking children and adults and discussed in relation to language-specific and physiological motor-speech constraints on production

An acoustic study of lexical stress contrastivity in children with and without autism spectrum disorders

“…The findings we report here have implications for research relying only on perceptual judgements of speech production. Like the earlier studies by Ballard et al (2012), Arciuli and Ballard (2017), and Arciuli and Colombo (2016), our findings suggest that, even when word productions are correct via perceptual judgements, there can be fine-grained acoustic differences in the way stress contrastivity is realised. In addition, our findings suggest that these subtle acoustic differences may interact with the stress pattern of target words.…”

“…In the current study we explored stress contrastivity in children with ASD versus typically developing (TD) children group-wise matched on age and vocabulary. We used the same methodology reported in recent studies of TD individuals that analysed stress contrastivity acoustically (Arciuli & Ballard, 2017;Arciuli & Colombo, 2016;Ballard, Djaja, Arciuli, James, & van Doorn, 2012).…”

“…The production of stress contrastivity has been examined in languages other than English. For example, Arciuli and Colombo (2016) conducted an acoustic study of Italian-speaking children's productions of trisyllabic words beginning with a SW or a WS pattern over the initial syllables. Results revealed that, unlike English-speaking children, young Italian-speaking children were adult-like in the way they produced stress contrastivity for the majority of trisyllabic WS words.…”

Pitch as the Main Determiner of Italian Lexical Stress Perception Across the Lifespan: Evidence From Typical Development and Dyslexia

“…Stimuli were natural syllables, but the same syllable was repeated three times across the string, thus producing a stimulus that is neutral at both the semantic and the lexical levels of analysis. Thus we may hypothesize that the reason why previous authors found that duration, and not pitch, was the critical feature in stress perception, is that some interaction occurs between the lexical/semantic levels and the early acoustic analyses in this process (Arciuli and Colombo, 2016), which changes the relative weight of the parameters in determining performance. Note that even in studies using pseudowords there might have been an implicit lexical contribution, as pseudowords partially activate the phonological lexicon and do so as a function of orthographic/phonological similarity (Rosson, 1983) (e.g., the pseudoword /tavoga/ is very likely to activate the lexical node /tavola/, table).…”

Word-level prosodic measures and the differential diagnosis of apraxia of speech

“…The pairwise variability index (PVI) was originally conceptualized as the normalized duration difference between adjacent syllables in connected speech and used to characterize speech rhythm and stress in neurotypical speakers who use different languages and dialects (Low, Grabe, & Nolan, 2000). Direct application to running speech has been possible for communication disorders that do not primarily affect linguistic fluency (Knight & Cocks, 2007; Maruthy, Venugopal, & Parakh, 2017) and, when modified for comparisons at the word level, the PVI has contributed to research addressing lexical stress development in children (Arciuli & Ballard, 2017; Arciuli & Colombo, 2016; Ballard, Djaja, Arciuli, James, & van Doorn, 2012) and the differentiation between AOS and aphasia (APH).…”