Lenition and Phonemic Overlap in Rome Italian

Lenition and Phonemic Overlap in Rome Italian

The purpose of this paper is to offer acoustic evidence for an unusual phonemic contrast in Rome Italian. In our corpus, about half of all tokens of intervocalic /p t k/ are realized with uninterrupted voicing (both word-internally and across word boundaries). Furthermore, the voiced realizations of /t/ and /k/ do not significantly differ from /d/ and /g/ in duration and/or degree of constricti...

Geminate Inalterability and Lenition

0. INTRODUCTION It is a well-known observation that phonological processes which apply to short segments frequently fail to apply to corresponding long ("geminate") segments. For example, post-vocalic spirantization of velar stops in Tigrinya yields [/a-xalIb] 'dogs' (cf. [k elbi] 'dog'), but [fekk er e] 'boasts', not [f exk er e] nor [f exx er e] (Kenstowicz 1982).1 This phenomenon of geminate...

Lenition and Optimality Theory

How do associative and phonemic overlap interact to boost illusory recollection?

This project investigated the underlying mechanisms that boost false remember responses when participants receive study words that are both semantically and phonologically similar to a critical lure. Participants completed a memory task in which they were presented with a list of words all associated with a critical lure. Included within the list of semantic associates was a target that was eit...

Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

In everyday speech, words may be reduced. Little is known about the consequences of such reductions for spoken word comprehension. This study investigated /t/-lenition in Dutch in two corpus studies and three perceptual experiments. The production studies revealed that /t/-lenition is most likely to occur after [s] and before bilabial consonants. The perception experiments showed that listeners...