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Two perceptual tests, designed to investigate the discrimination of the singleton/geminate consonant contrast, were submitted to bilingual English-Lucchese immigrants in the USA, and monolingual Lucchese subjects. The study has two major goals. The first goal is to add a muchneeded empirical contribution to the incredibly sparse literature on phonological/phonetic attrition in bilinguals. The second goal is to cast the analysis of phonological attrition for socio-linguistic reasons on a more general psycholinguistic framework for cross-language speech perception. As will be shown, the comparison between the performances of different groups of speakers in different perceptual tasks allowed us to verify that phonological attrition moves along patterns of perceptual sensitivity which can be fruitfully compared with those surfacing in L1/L2 phonological acquisition.

We propose an annotation schema for derivational morphology featuring morphological, morphotactic and morphosemantic information concerning the base of the derivative as well as each derivational cycle. This schema was employed in the manual annotation of about 11,000 Italian derivatives, extracted from the CoLFIS corpus. The outcome is DerIvaTario, an annotated lexicon of Italian derivatives. The inter-annotator agreement was assessed over several variables of the annotation schema. DerIvaTario is available as an interactive database to be used for theoretical morphology and psycholinguistic research, and as a resource for automatic tagging of large Italian corpora.

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In this paper we propose a frequency analysis of French liaison that focuses on the liaison environments attested in the PFC database. The results of the analysis show the existence of a significant relationship (statistically interpreted as a power-law distribution) according to which a very restricted set of liaison environments has very high frequency of occurrence in the corpus and is substantially untouched by phonological and sociolinguistic variation, while a large “periphery” of infrequent uses appears to show significant aspects of style- and speaker-dependent variation. The study therefore demonstrates the importance of basing any variationist analysis on very large data sample, such as those provided by contemporary, well-reasoned linguistic corpora.