Cronometrando los intervalos "V-to-V" en italiano: revisión y nuevas hipótesis

This paper is intended to discuss aspects of durational variability of V-to-V intervals in Italian from a phonetically based perspective. Recently, the interest in the phonetic properties underlying rhythm typologies has been growing, also as a consequence of the repeatedly observed weakness of phonological factors in the explanation of rhythmic differences. Timing is only one of the many aspects contributing to language rhythm. The speaker and the text are fundamental sources of variation, in the sense that rhythm depends far more on individual timing strategies than on the phonological structure of a languageEste artículo intenta describir aspectos de la variabilidad duracional de los intervalos V-to-V en italiano desde un punto de vista fonético. Recientemente ha aumentado el interés en las propiedades fonéticas subyacentes en las tipologías rítmicas, también como consecuencia de una debilidad de los factores fonológicos, observada repetidamente la explicación de diferencias rítmicas. El hablante y el texto son fuentes fundamentales de variación, en el sentido de que el ritmo depende más de estrategias temporales individuales que en la estructura fonológica de la lengu

Sociophonetic Variation and Change in Heritage Languages: Lexical Effects in Heritage Italian Aspiration of Voiceless Stops

In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language's phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the frequency of lexical items. Our results show that sociophonetic aspiration resists lexicalization and applies to both frequent and infrequent words even in the speech of third-generation speakers. By contrast, the progressive introduction of contact-induced phonetic change is led by high-frequency words. These findings add to the complexity of heritage language phonology by suggesting that the pronunciation features of a heritage language can follow different fates depending on their sociolinguistic roles

PHACTS about activation-based word similarity effects

International audienceEnglish phonotactic learning is modeled by means of the PHACTS algorithm, a topo- logical neuronal receptive field implement- ing a phonotactic activation function aimed at capturing both local (i.e., phonemic) and global (i.e., word-level) similarities among strings. Limits and merits of the model are presented

Lingue romanze in Africa

none3noIl volume prende spunto da una giornata di studi che ha avuto luogo presso Sapienza, Università di Roma nel maggio 2019. Riunisce specialisti di vari paesi, e parte dalla constatazione che gli studiosi che operano nelle varie aree della Romania africana (francese, portoghese e spagnola) soffrono di un eccessivo ed ingiustificato isolamento rispetto alle sfide complessive che il tema delle lingue romanze in Africa invece obbliga ad affrontare. Pro- prio in quest’ottica, il volume vuole favorire lo sviluppo di ricerche e analisi sempre più integrate e meno parcellizzate, a beneficio di una comprensione globale di fenomeni linguistici e sociali che condividono spazi e tempi di amplissima portata.openCelani Simone, Celata Chiara, Floquet OresteCelani, Simone; Celata, Chiara; Floquet, Orest