Consonant gemination in Italian: The affricate and fricative case

Abstract

Consonant gemination in Italian affricates and fricatives was investigated, completing the overall study of gemination of Italian consonants. Results of the analysis of other consonant categories, i.e. stops, nasals, and liquids, showed that closure duration for stops and consonant duration for nasals and liquids, form the most salient acoustic cues to gemination. Frequency and energy domain parameters were not significantly affected by gemination in a systematic way for all consonant classes. Results on fricatives and affricates confirmed the above findings, i.e., that the primary acoustic correlate of gemination is durational in nature and corresponds to a lengthened consonant duration for fricative geminates and a lengthened closure duration for affricate geminates. An inverse correlation between consonant and pre-consonant vowel durations was present for both consonant categories, and also for both singleton and geminate word sets when considered separately. This effect was reinforced for combined sets, confirming the hypothesis that a durational compensation between different phonemes may serve to preserve rhythmical structures. Classification tests of single vs. geminate consonants using the durational acoustic cues as classification parameters confirmed their validity, and highlighted peculiarities of the two consonant classes. In particular, a relatively poor classification performance was observed for affricates, which led to refining the analysis by considering dental vs. non-dental affricates in two different sets. Results support the hypothesis that dental affricates, in Italian, may not appear in intervocalic position as singletons but only in their geminate form.

Lexical and syntactic gemination in Italian consonants -- Does a geminate Italian consonant consist of a repeated or a strengthened consonant?

“…This project began at Sapienza University of Rome in 1992, with the goal of analyzing gemination in Italian consonants, based on the analysis of VCV vs. VCCV words. Results for stops (Esposito and Di Benedetto, 1999), nasals and liquids (Di Benedetto and De Nardis, 2020b), and fricatives and affricates (Di Benedetto and De Nardis, 2020a), showed a general tendency to shorten the pre-consonant vowel and to lengthen the word-medial consonant in a geminate word. No significant effects of gemination were observed on other acoustic parameters, such as energyand frequency-related measurements.…”

The GEMMA speech database: VCV and VCCV words for the acoustic analysis of consonants and lexical gemination in Italian

“…This is an important issue since gemination is contrastive in Italian, that is, geminating a consonant changes the meaning of words (for example pala (shovel) vs. palla (ball)). For an exhaustive discussion on the phenomenon of gemination see the research papers [1] , [2] using the GEMMA database and [4] , addressing both lexical and syntactic gemination in Italian. The choice of the Italian language does not limit the scope of the GEMMA database.…”

“…Six native adult speakers of Standard Italian, raised and living in Rome, Italy, three female and three male, uttered the speech materials in three different recording sessions; three repetitions for each word per speaker were therefore collected. The dataset also includes the durations of vowel and consonant segments for all cases where the consonant can be singleton vs. geminate (see [1] and [2] ).…”

“…The dataset also includes the durations of vowel and consonant segments for all cases where the consonant can be singleton vs. geminate (see [1] and [2] ).…”

Estimation of the frequency of occurence of italian phonemes in text

“…In addition to the frequencies of these phonemes, this study also tabulated the frequency of gemination for each of the consonants. The phenomenon of consonant gemination, which is unique to Italian among the Romance languages, offers potential for a wide range of studies (e.g., Esposito and Di Benedetto, 1999;Di Benedetto and De Nardis, 2019a;Di Benedetto and De Nardis, 2019b).…”