Estimation of the frequency of occurence of italian phonemes in text

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to derive a reliable estimate of the frequency of occurrence of the 30 phonemes -plus consonant geminated counterparts-of the Italian language, based on four selected written texts. Since no comparable dataset was found in previous literature, the present analysis may serve as a reference in future studies. Four textual sources were considered: Come si fa una tesi di laurea: le materie umanistiche by Umberto Eco, I promessi sposi by Alessandro Manzoni, a recent article in Corriere della Sera (a popular daily Italian newspaper), and In altre parole by Jhumpa Lahiri. The sources were chosen to represent varied genres, subject matter, time periods, and writing styles. Results of the analysis, which also included an analysis of variance, showed that, for all four sources, the frequencies of occurrence reached relatively stable values after about 6,000 phonemes (approx.1,250 words), varying by <0.025%. Estimated frequencies are provided for each single source and as an average across sources. I.

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

“…The LaMIT database was designed to reflect the typical frequency of occurrence of the different phonemes in the Italian language, as suggested by a recent study (Arango et al, 2021;Arango et al, 2020) that provides updated values of the phonemic frequencies, assuming the existence of 30 phonemes as identified by Muljacic (1972): (1) 7 vowels: /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /E/, /o/, /O/; (2) 21 consonants: /p/, /b/, /f/, /v/, /t/, /d/, /ts/, /dz/, /s/, /z/, /k/, /g/, /D/, /T/, /S/, /m/, /n/, /fi/, /l/, /k/, /r/; (3) 2 glides: /j/ and /w/. Allophones are excluded, consistent with the theoretical framework provided by Muljacic (1972).…”

Cross-language perception of Japanese consonant length by speakers from Italian- and Mandarin-speaking backgrounds

“…In future work, it would be useful to examine what other phonetic factors such as manner and place of articulation affect listeners’ consonant length perception (e.g. Arango et al, 2021; Liu, 2014). As Japanese uses both consonant and vowel duration contrastively, we would like to assess listeners’ length perception of different classes of sounds to confirm or disconfirm whether vowel length contrasts do indeed ‘pose little problems’ (Altmann et al, 2012) and consonantal length contrasts prove ‘to be difficult’ (Altmann et al, 2012).…”

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

“…The LaMIT database was designed so to reflect the typical frequency of occurrence of the different phonemes in the Italian language, as suggested by a recent study (Arango et al, 2020a), (Arango et al, 2020b) that provides updated values of the phonemic frequencies, Il fato ancora vs. Il fatto ancora, highlighting the lengthening of consonant and shortening of preceding vowel associated to gemination, as described in (Esposito and Di Benedetto, 1999).…”