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"Italian language -- Vowels"
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Approaches to metaphony in the languages of Italy
This volume presents current work on a topic in Romance linguistics that still informs linguistic theory to this day: metaphony in the languages of Italy.Papers discuss fundamental research topics such as phonological opacity in the light of chain shifts, post-tonic harmony and consonant transparency, the role of morphosyntax in the typology of.
eBook
Visible Vowels as a Tool for the Study of Language Transfer
In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Visible Vowels to detect formant and durational differences between L2 and L1 speakers. We used a dataset that contains vowel measures from L1 speakers of French and from L2 learners of French, with Italian, Spanish and English as L1. We found that vowels that are not part of the L1 phonological system are often pronounced differently by L2 speakers. Inspired by the Native Language Magnet Theory which was introduced by Patricia Kuhl in 2000, we introduced magnet plots that relate vowels shared by the French phonological system and the learners’ phonological system—the magnet vowels—to the vowels found only in the French phonological system. At a glance, it can be seen which vowels are attracted to the magnets and which vowels become further away from the magnets. When comparing vowel spaces, we found that the shape of the French vowel space of the English learners differed most from the shape of L1 speakers’ vowel space. Finally, it was found that the vowel durations of the L2 speakers are greater than that of the L1 speakers of French, especially those of the English learners of French.
Journal Article
Cross-Regional Patterns of Obstruent Voicing and Gemination: The Case of Roman and Veneto Italian
Italian has a length contrast in its series of voiced and voiceless obstruents while also presenting phonetic differences across regional varieties. Northern varieties of the language, including Veneto Italian (VI), are described as maintaining the voicing contrast but, in some cases, not the length contrast. In central and southern varieties, the opposite trend may occur. For instance, Roman Italian (RI) is reported to optionally pre-voice intervocalic voiceless singleton obstruents whilst also maintaining the length contrast for this consonant class. This study looks at the acoustic realization of selected obstruents in VI and RI and investigates (a) prevoicing patterns and (b) the effects and interactions of regional variety, gemination, and (phonological and phonetic) voicing on consonant (C) and preceding-vowel (V) durations, as well as the ratio between the two (C/V), with a focus on that particular measure. An acoustic phonetic analysis is conducted on 3703 tokens from six speakers from each variety, producing eight repetitions of 40 real CV́C(C)V and CVC(C)V́CV words embedded in carrier sentences, with /p, pp, t, tt, k, kk, b, bb, d, dd, ɡ, ɡɡ, f, ff, v, vv, t∫, tt∫, dʒ, ddʒ/ as the target intervocalic consonants. The results show that both VI and RI speakers produce geminates, yielding high C/V ratios in both varieties, although there are cross-regional differences in the realization of singletons. On the one hand, RI speakers tend to pre-voice voiceless singletons and produce overall shorter C durations and lower C/V ratios for these consonants. On the other hand, VI speakers produce longer C durations and higher C/V ratios for all voiceless singletons, triggering some overlap between the C length categories, which results in partial degemination through singleton lengthening, although only for voiceless obstruents. The implications of a trading relationship between phonetic voicing and duration of obstruents in Italian gemination are discussed.
Journal Article
Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification
Maltese is a prime example of a language that emerged through extensive language contact, joining the two linguistic worlds of Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. Previous studies have shown this shared origin on the basis of hands-on comparative methods. However, such approaches may be biased by the researchers perspective and the selected material. To avoid this bias, we employed a naive computational method that classifies words on the basis of their phonotactics. Specifically, we trained a simple two-layer neural network on Tunisian and Italian nouns, i.e. the languages that Maltese emerged from. We used the trained network to classify Maltese nouns based on their phonotactic characteristics as either of Tunisian or of Italian origin. Overall, the network is capable of correctly classifying Maltese nouns as belonging to either of the original languages. Moreover, we find that the classification depends on whether a noun has a sound or broken plural. By manipulating the segment identity in the training input, we found that consonants are more important for the classification of Maltese nouns than vowels. While our results replicate previous comparative studies, they also demonstrate that a more fine grained classification of a language’s origin can be based on individual words and morphological classes.
Journal Article
How is vowel production in Italian affected by geminate consonants and stress patterns?
Italian vowels have a shorter duration before a geminate than before a singleton consonant, but a longer duration in syllables carrying stress. We asked whether children can produce the differentiation in vowel duration in singleton/geminate contexts reported for adults and whether their production changes depending on position of primary stress. Italian children (three-to-six-year-olds) and adults performed a nonword repetition. Each nonword appeared in four contexts, with the stressed/unstressed vowel preceding/following the singleton/geminate: /paˈpaso/, /papˈpaso/, ˈpapaso/, /ˈpappaso/. Acoustic analyses on the duration of the vowel preceding (V1) and following (V2) the medial consonant showed a type of consonant by age group interaction: the difference in vowel duration between children and adults was greater for geminate than singleton contexts, and was greater when the vowel carried stress. When V1 carried stress, its duration was shorter in the geminate than in the singleton in adults and older children, not in younger children.
Journal Article
Effects of Encouraging the Use of Gestures on Speech
Purpose: Previous studies have investigated the effects of the inability to produce hand gestures on speakers' prosodic features of speech; however, the potential effects of encouraging speakers to gesture have received less attention, especially in naturalistic settings. This study aims at investigating the effects of encouraging the production of hand gestures on the following speech correlates: speech discourse length (number of words and discourse length in seconds), disfluencies (filled pauses, self-corrections, repetitions, insertions, interruptions, speech rate), and prosodic properties (measures of fundamental frequency [F0] and intensity). Method: Twenty native Italian speakers took part in a narration task in which they had to describe the content of short comic strips to a confederate listener in 1 of the following 2 conditions: (a) nonencouraging condition (N), that is, no instructions about gesturing were given, and (b) encouraging condition (E), that is, the participants were instructed to gesture while telling the story. Results: Instructing speakers to gesture led effectively to higher gesture rate and salience. Significant differences were found for (a) discourse length (e.g., the narratives had more words in E than in N) and (b) acoustic measures (F0 maximum, maximum intensity, and mean intensity metrics were higher in E than in N). Conclusion: The study shows that asking speakers to use their hands while describing a story can have an effect on narration length and can also impact on F0 and intensity metrics. By showing that enhancing the gesture stream could affect speech prosody, this study provides further evidence that gestures and prosody interact in the process of speech production.
Journal Article
Cross-cultural evaluation of learning and memory using a consonant-vowel-consonant trigram list
Word list-learning tasks are commonly used to evaluate auditory-verbal learning and memory. However, different frequencies of word usage, subtle meaning nuances, unique word phonology, and different preexisting associations among words make translation across languages difficult. We administered lists of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonword trigrams to independent American and Italian young adult samples. We evaluated whether an auditory list-learning task using CVC nonword trigrams instead of words could be applied cross-culturally to evaluate similar learning and associative memory processes.
Seventy-five native English-speaking (USA) and 104 native Italian-speaking (Italy) university students were administered 15-item lists of CVC trigrams using the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test paradigm with five study-test trials, an interference trial, and short- and long-term delayed recall. Bayesian
tests and mixed-design ANOVAs contrasted the primary learning indexes across the two samples and biological sex.
Performance was comparable between nationalities on all primary memory indices except the interference trial (List B), where the Italian group recalled approximately one item more than the American sample. For both nationalities, recall increased across the five learning trials and declined significantly on the postinterference trial, demonstrating susceptibility to retroactive interference. No effects of sex, age, vocabulary, or depressive symptoms were observed.
Using lists of unfamiliar nonword CVC trigrams, Italian and American younger adults showed a similar performance pattern across immediate and delayed recall trials. Whereas word list-learning performance is typically affected by cultural, demographic, mood, and cognitive factors, this trigram list-learning task does not show such effects, demonstrating its utility for cross-cultural memory assessment.
Journal Article
Apocope in Heritage Italian
Apocope (deletion of word-final vowels) and word-final vowel reduction are hallmarks of southern Italian varieties. To investigate whether heritage speakers reproduce the complex variable patterns of these processes, we analyze spontaneous speech of three generations of heritage Calabrian Italian speakers and a homeland comparator sample. All occurrences (N = 2477) from a list of frequent polysyllabic words are extracted from 25 speakers’ interviews and analyzed via mixed effects models. Tested predictors include: vowel identity, phonological context, clausal position, lexical frequency, word length, gender, generation, ethnic orientation and age. Homeland and heritage speakers exhibit similar distributions of full, reduced and deleted forms, but there are inter-generational differences in the constraints governing the variation. Primarily linguistic factors condition the variation. Homeland variation in reduction shows sensitivity to part of speech, while heritage speakers show sensitivity to segmental context and part of speech. Slightly different factors influence apocope, with suprasegmental factors and part of speech significant for homeland speakers, but only part of speech for heritage speakers. Surprisingly, for such a socially marked feature, few social factors are relevant. Factors influencing reduction and apocope are similar, suggesting the processes are related.
Journal Article
Robustness and Complexity in Italian Mid Vowel Contrasts
Accounts of phonological contrast traditionally invoke a binary distinction between unpredictable lexically stored phonemes and contextually predictable allophones, whose patterning reveals speakers’ knowledge about their native language. This paper explores the complexity of contrasts among Italian mid vowels from a multifaceted perspective considering the lexicon, linguistic structure, usage, and regional variety. The Italian mid vowels are marginally contrastive due to a scarcity of minimal pairs alongside variation in phonetic realization. The analysis considers corpus data, which indicate that the marginal contrasts among front vowels vs. back vowels are driven by different sources and forces. Functional loads are low; while front /e ɛ/ have the weakest lexical contrast among all Italian vowels, back /o ɔ/ are separated by somewhat more minimal pairs. Among stressed front vowels, height is predicted by syllable structure and is context-dependent in some Italian varieties. Meanwhile, the height of back mid vowels is predicted by lexical frequency, in line with expectations of phonetic reduction in high-frequency contexts. For both front and back vowels, the phonetic factor of duration predicts vowel height, especially in closed syllables, suggesting its use for contrast enhancement. The results have implications for a proposed formalization of Italian mid vowel variation.
Journal Article