This study investigates the intonation of Bari exclamative sentences. In this Southern variety of Italian, the prosodic features of non-wh exclamatives and broad focus statements have been studied in both production and perception. By means of a gating experiment, stimuli of partial or complete utterances were presented to listeners in order to verify the melodic differences between sentence minimal pairs, i.e. exclamative vs. assertive. Results obtained with listeners suggest that the initial f0 pattern has a very strong effect on the perception of exclamatives.

Index Terms: Italian language, exclamative sentences, intonation, gating paradigm.