Positional Effect in the Articulation and Acoustics of Stressed Vowels in Italian

Lexical stress may be signalled through a large number of acoustic parameters.In Italian, stress is realized through (1) longer duration, (2) more peripheral vowels (F1/F2) , and (3) higher intensity.Moreover, duration has been shown to be sensitive to the position where stress occurs in the word: penultimate stressed syllables are longer than antepenultimate stressed syllables.Little is known however on other acoustic correlates and on articulatory correlates of this positional effect.Using EMA (AG501), we aim to investigate and to describe the interplay between the acoustic and articulatory parameters of this positional effect.The results show that (i) antepenultimate stressed vowels are shorter than penultimate ones, (ii) antepenultimate and penultimate stressed vowels show a comparable hyperarticulated pattern in tongue dorsum position and formant structure, (iii) while antepenultimate stress' intensity increases in accordance with lip aperture, penultimate stress' intensity peak occurs at the beginning of the vowel and is followed by a slope.This is not in accordance with the pattern of lip aperture.The findings are discussed within the hyperarticulation and the sonority expansion theories of prominence, and also within the framework of Articulatory Phonology.