Influence of semantics on the perception of Corrective Focus in spoken Italian language

This study is a web-based, psychoacoustic test for adult, Italian native-speakers, investigating detection of different prosodic phenomena in Standard Italian utterances. The purpose was to investigate the influence of semantics on human ability to recognise different prosodic aspects, in order to understand the basic pieces of information involved into the psychoacoustic process of verbal comprehension. In particular, one section of the test regarded the ability to recognize the presence of a Corrective Focus, which is a spoken constituent that is a direct rejection of an alternative. Results show Corrective Focus seems difficult to detect into isolated audio utterances. Semantics seems to improve detection accuracy; phonotactics, instead, seems not to add useful information; finally, our test confirms correlation with prominent syllables.