Phonetic Distinctiveness vs. Lexical Contrastiveness in Non-Robust Phonemic Contrasts

Abstract

It is known that the mid vowel contrasts of Standard Italian distinguish few minimal pairs, may be lexically variable, and show some degree of phonological conditioning in certain varieties. As such, they are relevant to recent suggestions that phonemic contrast may be partial, gradient, or otherwise more cognitively complex than traditionally assumed. Production data and vowel height judgments from 17 speakers confirm that most have clear phonetic distinctions between higher and lower mid vowels. However, the lexical distribution of these vowels is variable, and (in some speakers) phonologically conditioned to some extent; and though phonological awareness for all speakers is broadly accurate, we also observe cases where production and speaker judgment fail to match, in part because individual speakers' productions are variable. This suggests that the somewhat marginal status of the Italian mid vowel contrasts resides in the link between phonetic categories and individual lexical items, not in any indistinctness of the phonetic categories themselves.

An exploratory study of voicing-related differences in vowel duration as compensatory temporal adjustment in Italian and Polish

“…6 Most are nonce words, although inevitably some combinations produce real words both in Italian 6 Italian has both a mid-low [ɔ] and a mid-high [o] back vowel in its vowel inventory. These vowels are traditionally described as two distinct phonemes (Krämer 2009), although both their phonemic status and their phonetic substance are subject to a high degree of geographical and idiosyncratic variability (Renwick & Ladd 2016 (Renwick & Ladd 2016). On the other hand, Polish has only a mid-low back vowel phoneme /ɔ/ (Gussmann 2007).…”

Effects of lexical ambiguity, frequency, and acoustic details in auditory perception

“…Homophones can exhibit significant phonetic differences in production due to word frequency (e.g., Gahl, 2008;Guion, 1995) and part of speech (e.g., Conwell, 2017;Sorensen, Cooper, & Paccia, 1978). If these differences are part of the representation, it would seem that some apparent homophone mates are actually cases of marginal phonological contrasts, phonetic differences which are less systematic than phonological contrasts either in perception or production, but nonetheless have reliably measurable differences (e.g., Renwick & Ladd, 2016;Scobbie & Stuart-Smith, 2008). Hall (2013) provides an overview of work that has identified and characterized such relationships; they are widely attested.…”

The role of early experience and continued language use in bilingual speech production: A study of Galician and Spanish mid vowels by Galician-Spanish bilinguals

“…/e-ɛ/ and /o-ɔ/ (Regueira, 1996), while Spanish only distinguishes a single mid front and mid back vowel. Previous work from Galician and other Romance languages, has shown that these contrasts are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain (Amengual, 2016;Amengual & Chamorro, 2015;Mora, Keidel & Flege, 2015;Mora & Nadeu, 2012;Nadeu & Renwick, 2016;Pallier, Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997;Renwick & Ladd, 2016;Renwick & Nadeu, 2018;Tomé Lourido & Evans, 2015Simonet, 2011). This instability has not only been documented in bilingual settings where acquisition and maintenance may be adversely affected by interaction with a language that lacks mid vowel contrasts, as in the case of Galician and Catalan, but also in monolingual settings.…”