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The aim of this paper is to classify Romanian dialects from a prosodic point of view within the European Romance-speaking area. The data is part of the Multimedia Atlas of Romance Prosody - AMPER (Contini, 1992) and is analysed dialectometrically by means of ProDis (Elvira-García et al., 2015; Fernández Planas, 2016). The database includes more than 17,000 utterances produced by 48 speakers from 26 survey sites of 15 varieties of 6 Romance languages (Catalan, Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, Friulian and Romanian). The results show that the two main prosodic areas of Romanian (see Roseano, 2016b) remain separate when they are dialectometrized with data from other Romance languages. In addition, if one analyses questions and statements separately, it can be seen that questions allow us to distinguish geoprosodic areas more effectively than statements do (as suggested by previous studies such as Fernández Planas et al., 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new tool that performs dialectometric analysis using prosodic acoustic data. This method differs from previous approaches of prosodic dialectometry in the following aspects: 1) the approach does not need a previous intonational transcription, 2) it considers all prosodic parameters (intonation, duration and intensity), 3) it offers a complete set of transparent statistical tests, 4) it is user-friendly, and fully automatic and the computation does not require a concatenation of scripts and applications. The paper also presents the results obtained using the prosody of several Romance varieties. The correlation among the computed acoustic distances with the distances perceived by human listeners (r = 0.6139, p  < .0001) shows the reliability of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]