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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Lenition and phonemic overlap in Rome Italian
José Ignacio Hualde1, Marianna Nadeu
1Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. jihualde@illinois.edu
Abstract:
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 constriction (as acoustically determined). Phonemic contrast is maintained under substantial phonetic overlap. Regarding the labials, duration keeps /p/ and /b/ apart. Contrary to the universal tendency, it is /b/ that is considerably longer, due to complex diachronic facts.
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