1,721,127 research outputs found

    Consonant gemination in first and second language acquisition

    No full text
    Consonant gemination is a relatively infrequent feature in world phonologies, and an area of evident uncertainty in he pronunciation of language learners. The presence of geminate consonants is correlated with several other rhythmic and prosodic characteristics of the language. It is therefore particularly important to understand the complex mechanism by which gemination progressively makes room for itself in the development of the speakers' phonological competence. This volume collects six contributions that deal with how children and adults acquire geminate consonants of Italian, Wolof, Finnish, Japanese and Hebrew. The adults are L2 learners with varied linguistic backgrounds, including English, German, Chinese and some Nigerian languages such as Edo or Igbo. This book coalesces a relatively large number of L1s and L2s, thus opening perspectives of truly comparative research in the study of geminate acquisition. The volume is of interest to phonologists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, scholars working in the field of pronunciation teaching, speech pathologists, as well as to technological and forensic applications of speech research

    Tra fonetica articolatoria e sociolinguistica: il caso dell'assimilazione di luogo nei nessi di nasale + occlusiva velare in italiano

    No full text
    In this paper, the process of nasal place assimilation in /nk/, /ng/ clusters in Italian is discussed from a unified perspective which takes into account not only the articulatory detail (as attested in recent electropalatographic studies on the subject), but also the sociolinguistic aspects of (ng) production in some Romance and Germanic languag- es. Diachronic preferences in the development of homorganic clusters from Latin to Romance and typological generalizations referring to the phonological status and the phonotactic limitations in the distribution of the velar nasal are also considered. Cross- linguistic variability and articulatory gradience, as manifested in multiple phonetic influences exerting over large constituents, are shown to be problematic for phonologi- cal theory as well as for descriptive accounts of nasal place assimilation in Italian. In- vestigations in the stylistic domain are proposed to be of particular relevance in order to uncover aspects of systematic variation in /nk/, /ng/ production

    Advances in Sociophonetics

    No full text
    Sociophonetics is a privileged domain for the investigation of language variation and change. By combining theoretical reflections and sophisticated techniques of analysis, both phonetic and statistical, it is possible to disentangle step by step the role of individual factors (socio-cultural, physiological, communicative-interactional etc.) in the multidimensional space of speech variation. Covering a relatively large number of Germanic and Romance languages and dialects, Advances in Sociophonetics investigates the fundamental relation between speech variation and the social background of speakers from articulatory, acoustical, dialectological and conversational perspectives, thus breaking new ground with respect to classical variationist and dialectological studies. Specialists from a broad range of disciplines – including phoneticians, phonologists, sociolinguists, psycholinguists and researchers in cognitive linguistics – will find innovative suggestions for multiple approaches to the study of speech and language variation. Although the papers included in the volume assume some basic knowledge of experimental phonetics and sociolinguistic literature, the book is addressed to all readers interested in understanding speech and language variation mechanisms in social interaction
    corecore