Perception of metaphony: a comparison between two dialects of the Lausberg area (southern Italy).

Greca, Pia (2023): Perception of metaphony: a comparison between two dialects of the Lausberg area (southern Italy). 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Prague, Czech Republic, 7-11 August 2023. Skarnitzl, Radek und Volín, Jan (eds.) : In: Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, pp. 277-281

Abstract

In several sound changes, differences in production do not necessarily match those in perception. This study explores this relationship in two varieties (MZ: Mittelzone; MM: Mormanno) spoken in the Lausberg area of Southern Italy that differ in the degree to which inflectional phonetic cues are transferred from a suffix to a phonetically mid stem vowel. In MZ, the transfer can be complete (e.g. [mEs, mis]; cf. Standard Italian [meze, mezi], month/months), whereas in MM it is more marginal and with suffix preservation. Listeners of both varieties identified in a forced-choice test inflectional information from stems in MM- and MZ-produced stimuli with all suffix information removed. The results showed a perceptual advantage in morphological categorisation when listeners perceived stems of their own variety, and suggest that, compatibly with speech production, MM listeners use a phonetic mode of perception in categorising morphological information, whereas in MZ the perceptual strategy is more phonological.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
• EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: 101053194
• EU Projects: Horizon Europe > ERC Grants > ERC Advanced Grant > ERC Grant 101053194: SoundAct - The actuation of sound change
• Keywords: Metaphony, perception, dialect variation, sound change, phonologisation
• Faculties: Languages and Literatures > Department 2 > Speech Science
• Subjects: 400 Language > 450 Italian, Romanian, and related languages
• Annotation: ISBN 978-80-908 114-2-3
• Language: English