Gemination in Northern versus Central and Southern Varieties of Italian: A Corpus-based Investigation

Abstract

It is often claimed that patterns of gemination are different across varieties of Italian. In particular, northern speakers are sometimes said to degeminate, or to produce shorter geminates than central and southern speakers. However, experimental data proving such claims is largely missing. In this article, we perform an analysis of the CLIPS corpus with the aim of comparing gemination for northern versus central and southern speakers of Italian. The analysis of different data types (target words in isolated position, read sentences, dialogues, local radio and TV broadcasts) revealed that: (a) geminate consonants are produced by all speakers, incl. northern speakers; (b) differences in the magnitude of consonant lengthening are small (< 19 ms) and reach significance only for some data types; (c) the shortening of vowels preceding geminate consonants is mainly restricted to isolated target words in nuclear position, with no significant differences between northern and central/southern speakers. We argue that regional differences in Italian gemination have been overestimated and overemphasized in the literature. In fact, the evidence suggests that they are not as sizeable as previously thought, probably because of the progressive standardization of the language.

Orthographic forms affect speech perception in a second language: Consonant and vowel length in L2 English.

“…The bilinguals were native speakers of central and southern varieties of Standard Italian. Gemination is well documented in these varieties of Italian, where geminate consonants are phonetically about twice as long as corresponding singletons (Bertinetto & Loporcaro, 2005; Giordano & Savy, 2012; Mairano & De Iacovo, 2020, found similar durations in contemporary northern varieties). The bilingual participants had lived in Italy at least until high school graduation, and had been living in England for an average of 8 years ( SD = 6).…”

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

“…Previous studies [7 , 8] suggested in fact that the Roman accent, although distinctive, is phonologically close to Standard Italian: it shares with Standard Italian a same phoneme inventory and phonotactic rules and shows similar behavior with respect to consonant gemination, in particular when spoken by educated people [8] , although, as also pointed out by Payne in [7] , the concept of Standard Italian is somewhat idealized. As a matter of fact, a progressive standardization of the Italian language was observed in a recent and comprehensive study on gemination across regional variations of Italian [9] . Note that a recent Italian read speech database also made use of speakers from Rome [10] , and led to new insights on lexical vs. syntactic gemination [4] .…”

Comparing prosody of Italian varieties and dialects: data from Neapolitan

“…Given the long-standing contact between Standard Italian and dialects, it is likely that intonational patterns of ND are transferred to NI, parallel to what has been observed in other varieties [15], besides possible levelling effects which are known to affect dialects in the direction of standard languages [25,26]. A relevant case in this sense is provided by information-seeking yes-no questions in ND, whose tune seems to display the same rise-fall L*+H HL-L% pattern observed in NI [4,5,6], in which L*+H and HL-mark the beginning and the end of the focus constituent -Figures 1-2.…”