title: Declination of supralaryngeal gestures in spoken Italian.
abstract: Two experiments investigate a weakening of supralaryngeal gestures in an utterance, analogous in some ways to declination of fundamental frequency and amplitude. In one experiment, acoustic measures revealed progressive centralization of stressed /i/, /a/ and /u/ left to right in trisyllabic utterances read by Tuscan subjects. A second experiment, using speakers of a different (Northern) variety of Standard Italian, found reduction in jaw opening for stressed /a/ left to right, but generally failed to replicate a centralization of /i/. This experiment further suggested that the progressive weakening of supralaryngeal gestures is largely a phrase level rather than a word level phenomenon. Both experiments found a different, V-shaped, pattern of opening to be generally characteristic of unstressed syllables.
authors.affiliation: Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vayra
authors.forename: C A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Fowler
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D007830:Larynx / Q000502:physiology*; D010699:Phonation / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics