Tonal Alignment in Two Pisa Italian Peak Accents

A read speech corpus was collected in order to study the tonal targets alignment of two Pisa Italian peak accents. The production of the two accents was forced by inducing a broad and a contrastive interpretation of the target words inserted in small paragraphs. Results of latency and F0 measurements reveal that the contrastive accent has a low target at a 'fixed' distance after the peak whereas the broad focus accent has a target which is influenced by the postaccentual context. Moreover, both broad and contrastive accents are preceded by a low target at a 'fixed' difference from the peak. The interpretation of this target remains provisional and the resulting analysis is [L+]H* for the broad focus accent and [L+]H*+L for the contrastive accent, both followed by a low edge tone.