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This paper contains the results of a set of perception tests that aimed at measuring perceived prosodic distances between different Romance languages (Italian, Friulian, Sardinian, Catalan, and Spanish). Data were collected within the framework of the AMPER project. The results were obtained by means of discrimination and identification tasks where the judges were 31 native speakers of Catalan form Barcelona and the stimuli were broad focus statements and yes-no questions in the above-mentioned languages. The perceived distances are then compared with the results of a dialectometric analysis of acoustic data. This comparison shows that the perceived distances are related to acoustic differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on an experimental corpus of 1,020 sentences, provides a description of the intonation of wh-questions in Central Catalan, which had not been studied in depth so far. The data show that wh-questions display a greater variety of intonation patterns than yes/no questions. The paper argues that each intonation pattern is preferably associated with a specific pragmatic meaning (asking for information, offering information, giving an order and so far). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]