The influence of prominence on the production of plosives in Italian

This study explores prosodic strengthening in the production of fortis plosives in Italian as a function of four structural levels of prominence, reflecting differing focal conditions (in order of increasing prominence: postfocal, broad focus, narrow focus and contrastive narrow focus). The overall analysis indicated that for lingual consonants closure duration was the most important acoustic parameter, differing not only when comparing the most diverging levels, contrastive and postfocal, but also when comparing the broad focus and postfocal conditions. For the labial plosive, /p/, the parameter that was affected most by the level of prominence was burst energy. Unsurprisingly, given the lack of aspiration in the language, there was no consistent effect on VOT.