The prosody of Italian newsreading: a diachronic analysis

Current research in the field has identified a broadcast newsreading style and described it in terms of variations in prosodic parameters as compared to, for example, a narrative style or conversational speech. However, less is known about how the prosodic style of newsreading has evolved diachronically. With the aim of filling this gap, we compared the prosodic style of Italian newsreading originally recorded at the end of the 1960s with the productions of two newscasters in 2005, who were instructed to read the 1960s news using their current newscast reading style. To analyse the intonation of these two styles, we adopted an innovative methodology capturing the time-varying dynamics of F0 along the dimension of Wiggliness (time-varying F0 in terms of slope changes), and Spaciousness (F0 excursions at largest rises and falls). Results show that although in terms of Wiggliness and Spaciousness the intonation styles were similar across the two eras, mean pitch was higher in the modern era. Additionally, there was a considerable increase in speech rate. This increase in rate was mainly achieved by reducing the number and duration of pauses, thus producing much longer inter-pausal units as compared to thenewsreading style in the 1960s