From Tones to tunes: Effects of the f0 prenuclear region in the perception of Neapolitan statements and questions

Most research on tune meaning has focussed on the contribution of the nuclear configuration (composed of nuclear accent, phrase accent and boundary tone), while the meaning contribution of the prenuclear contour (i.e., the intonational region preceding the nuclear accent) is still understudied. In Neapolitan Italian, differences in early (L+H*) vs. late (L*+H) nuclear accent alignment are used to differentiate narrow focus statements and yes/no questions. Furthermore, a tone appears to be inserted at the right edge of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in the prenuclear contour, which is differently specified in questions (HAP) and in statements (LAP). In this paper, we test the hypothesis that such a difference in AP tonal specification would help Neapolitan listeners to recover the contrast between questions and statements early within the intonation phrase. Both an identification and a semantic differential task were run on gated stimuli, in which the nuclear accent information was omitted. Results show that the prenuclear contour carries enough information in order to distinguish the two intonation modalities and that AP scaling manipulation significantly affects listeners’ judgments. This challenges the idea that the nuclear configuration alone is relevant for the questions-statements distinction, thus implying that tune meaning is the result of the interaction between prenuclear and nuclear f 0 contours.