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

Aspects of vowel-consonant coordination in Italian

Consonant Gemination in Japanese Loanword Phonology

The distribution of geminate obstruents in Japanese loanwords appears very complex. Some consonants are more prone to gemination than others, on the one hand, and one and the same consonant is more likely to geminate in some phonological contexts than in others, on the other hand. This paper tackles these problems by considering the relationship between consonant gemination in native words and ...

Consonant-Final Loanwords and Epenthetic Vowels in Italian*

The quality of an epenthetic vowel in a particular language may vary depending on segmental and prosodic factors, such as the quality of the surrounding consonants, the quality of other vowels in the word, and the position of the epenthetic vowel within the word. This last factor has received little attention in the literature. I have identified a number of cases in Italian in which the quality...

Coarticulation of consonant clusters in Italian learners of French

The present study focuses on how Italian learners of French as L2 coarticulate French heterosyllabic sibilant sequences and how speech rate influences the production of these non-native sequences. As in Italian consonant sequences are less frequent than in French and very rarely appear across word boundary, the hypothesis is that a different degree of coarticulation is found in clusters produce...

Perception of Italian and Japanese Consonant Length by Native Speakers of Australian English and Italian: A Pilot Study

We examined the perception of Italian (IT) and Japanese (JP) consonant length contrasts (singleton vs geminate) in two groups of listeners: native speakers of IT and Australian English (OZ). Our preliminary results suggest that the IT listeners’ experience with singleton/geminate contrasts was more beneficial than the OZ listeners’ experience with vowel length contrasts in processing JP singlet...