Post-aspiration in standard Italian

Stevens, Mary and Hajek, John (2010): Post-aspiration in standard Italian. Some first cross-regional acoustic evidence. Interspeech 2010, 26. - 30. September 2010, Makuhari, Japan.

Abstract

Voiceless geminate stops in Italian are typically described as unaspirated in all positions (e.g. [1, 2]). However, recent acoustic phonetic analysis of part of a corpus of standard Italian speech data has shown that the geminate voiceless stops /pp tt kk/ are frequently realized with both preaspiration i.e. [hp: ht: hk:] (cf. [3]) and post-aspiration. This paper focuses on the latter phenomenon, presenting acoustic phonetic evidence in the form of VOT duration values for /pp tt kk/ tokens recorded in 15 Italian cities (based on the CLIPS corpus of spoken Italian [4, 5]). The co-occurrence of post-aspiration with preaspiration is considered and results are discussed with a focus on regional patterns.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Other)
• Published in: Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (ed.). (2010): Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. ISCA:, pp. 1557-1560
• Keywords: post-aspiration, Italian, geminate, voiceless stop, preaspiration
• Collections: Languages and Literatures > Language and Communication
• Subjects: 400 Language > 450 Italian, Romanian, and related languages
• Language: English