The perception of speaker certainty in salerno italian intonation

One of the main uses of intonation form is to signal pragmatic information. Recent research on intonational meaning has shown that epistemic information about propositional content of utterances within a discourse can also be tonally encoded. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether speaker certainty about the answer to a polar question can be recovered by listeners of Salerno Italian and whether identification is affected by tune type. In an online perception survey, three similarly frequent polar question tunes were rated according to degree of perceived speaker certainty relative to the question response. Results support the hypothesis that tune type affects degree of certainty perception. The study also supports the hypothesis that additional factors – both sociophonetic (i.e., living abroad) and idiosyncratic – might affect variability in intonation perception within a language community.