Near-merger of /s: ʃ/ in Veneto Italian: A preliminary cross-generational acoustic investigation

Abstract

Italian contrasts /s:/ and /ʃ/. Although in standard Italian (SI) the two phonemes have distinct places of articulation (laminal denti-alveolar and laminal post-alveolar, respectively), early descriptions of the Italian spoken in the Veneto (VI) report a near-merger due to the absence of /ʃ/ in the regional substratum dialect (Canepari 1984). Accordingly, /s:/ is retracted and aplicalized, and /ʃ/ is advanced and in some cases also apicalized in VI. To investigate this phenomenon, an acoustic and statistical analysis of spectral Center of Gravity (COG), known to increase with more advanced constriction location for coronals, is conducted on 192 /s:/ and /ʃ/ tokens produced by six VI speakers (three males and three females) of varying ages (34 to 68) producing eight repetitions of /ˈkassa kasˈsata ˈlaʃa laˈʃata/ ‘case, cassata cake, he/she/it leaves, left’ within carrier sentences. Results show that, regardless of sex, the two older speakers (50 and 68) but not the four younger speakers (34 to 44) produce statistically similar COG values for the two consonants, indicating similar constriction locations. This preliminary study suggests that the near-merger may be produced by older speakers but not younger speakers today, in an ongoing process of standardization of Italian pronunciation across regional varieties.