THE PERCEPTION OF THE CLOSURE LENGTH CONTINUUM IN ITALIAN

new example of categorical perception, typical of the Italian language , is presented here. Discrimination and identification experiments are performed for the Italian natural continuum /'ada/ - /'ad:a/ and for a synthetic poor-quality copy of this continuum. The natural continuum is perceived in a rather categorical manner, whereas the perception o f the synthetic poor-quality copy is neither categorical nor continuou s. Results are in accordance with the statement of Schouten and van He ssen (J. Acoust. Sec. Am. 92, 1841-1855 (1992)) of a less categorical perception of poor-quality stimuli compared to high-quality stimuli.