Declination of supralaryngeal gestures in spoken Italian.

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.