Intonational cues to discourse structure in Bari and Pisa Italian: perceptual evidence

Perception experiments for Bari and Pisa Italian showed that listeners can reliably distinguish between final and non-final utterances in discourse by means of intonation. Bari listeners were also able to distinguish a third category, signa lling that the end of the discourse unit is approaching (penultimate position). This was not the case for Pisa listeners, although there was possibly an effect of speaking style.