School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemStop (de)gemination in Veneto Italian: The role of durational correlates.(Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, 2022-12-16)This preliminary study investigates a long-assumed but previously untested degemination of stops in the regional variety of Italian spoken in the Veneto, in North-East Italy. The durational parameters known to be affected by gemination in Italian – i.e., consonant duration, duration of the preceding vowel and the ratio between the two – are considered. The entire Italian stop series is investigated through an acoustic-phonetic production experiment involving six speakers reading a set of carrier sentences designed to elicit different prosodic patterns. Partial degemination is observed for most speakers in terms of (a) decreased geminate-singleton consonant duration differences compared to previous studies on other Italian varieties, and (b) considerable overlap between geminate and singleton consonant-to-vowel duration ratio categories. Possible sociophonetic effects are discussed.
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ItemPerception of consonant length in familiar and unfamiliar languages by native speakers of Mandarin, Italian and Japanese(ISCA, 2020)This study builds on our previous research and provides additional analyses to determine if there is a relationship between the ability to process consonant length in familiar and unfamiliar languages for learners of Japanese whose native language is Italian or Mandarin. The emphasis is on L2-L3 (second-third language) phonetic influence. Japanese and Italian use consonant length contrastively, but not Mandarin. We thus asked if Mandarin learners with higher proficiency in Japanese are more or less accurate in length identification than Italian learners with first language (L1) experience of consonant length. Specifically, we focused on finding out if learners who accurately identify Japanese consonant length might also be accurate in their identification of the length category in Italian. Four groups of listeners differing in their L1 (Italian x 2 groups, Japanese, Mandarin) and experience with consonant length participated in forced-choice identification experiments. L1 Japanese and L1 Italian listeners identified the length category more accurately in their L1 than in the foreign language (FL). The ability to identify consonant length in Japanese and Italian by 18 advanced Mandarin-speaking learners of Japanese seemed unrelated. This suggests that speech processing skills acquired in one FL may not automatically transfer to another FL.