Contrastive stress in Italian stutterers

We assess, both perceptually and acoustically, the association between stuttering and prosody. Phonetic materials were sentences prompted by preceding questions and containing two words (Subject/Verb), produced with normal and inverted word order. Each word in any position could be under narrow focus, broad focus, or out of focus. Each sentence was repeated three times. Results could be split in two parts: from one hand we did not find neither statistical significant association between focus, word position, lexical stress and stuttering episodes, nor significant differences between stutterers and nonstutterers in duration measures of fluent utterances. From the other hand, measures of the F0 dynamics revealed some subtle differences in the way stutterers realize the condition of focus.