Cinzia Avesani

Cinzia Avesani is a speech scientist with a special interest in the prosody of the spoken language. She recieved her Perfezionamento (PhD) in Linguistics from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and worked as linguistics consultant at ATT-Bell Laboratories (NJ, USA).

Her main research interests focus on the phonological and phonetic aspects of L1 and L2 prosody, approached from a Laboratory Phonology perspective; on the study of heritage languages and on non-native and second language speech perception.

She has published papers on the phonetics and phonology of Italian intonation; on prosody and discourse structure; on the prosody-syntax interface; on the prosodic disambiguation of potentially ambiguous semantic and syntactic structures in a cross-linguistic perspective; and on prosody and information structure in L1 and L2. She worked also on timing and coarticulation, and on the articulatory bases of prominence within the frameworks of Articulatory Phonology and Task Dynamics; on non-native speech perception and, recently, on the maintenance of the native language in the speech of Italian-Australian immigrants.

She served as member of the scientic board in many international and national congresses, as occasional reviewer for speech journals as as Journal of Phonetics and Journal of IPA and as external expert for evaluating grant assignments for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) and the Estonian Research Council.

She is the Editor of the open-access book series Studi AISV (Associazione Italiana di Scienze della Voce) and past Vice-President of the same association (2010-2016).

You can find the complete list of her publications here