On the phonetics of rhythm of Italian: patterns of duration in pre-planned and spontaneous speech

This paper is concerned with the phonetic correlates of main stress in Italian and presents the analysis of the duration of syllabic nuclei in connected speech and in different speaking styles. Spontaneous dialogues are analysed basing on earlier works on pre-planned speech which investigated both [+stress] / [-stress] and stress/accent contrasts in Italian. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of two prosodic factors on the duration pattern of the intonation groups: 1) phonological prominences pertaining to different prosodic tiers (rhythmical and intonational), and 2) their position in the intonation group. Results show that the temporal pattern of the intonation group would actually depend on different factors on both prosodic layers: stress, pertaining to rhythm, and post-lexical factors, pertaining to intonation and to prosodic phrasing.