Focus and Prosody in the Oral Productions of Stutterers

Massimiliano Marchiori, Claudio Zmarich, Cinzia Avesani and Simona Bernardini

The realization of the informative and contrastive focus in a small group of Italian adult stutterers pronouncing sentences with a SV and a VS word order is analyzed. The dysfluent productions showed a significant statistical association of stuttering episodes with the initial syllable of the noun (against the verb). The investigation of the prosodic characteristics of the stutterers’ fluent speech revealed that, contrary to expectations, the word in narrow focus does not necessarily bear the major prominence of the utterance, and the associated pitch accent showed an earlier alignment, compared to nonstutterers’, of the F0 peak within the stressed vowel.