Romance Phonetics and Phonology

Abstract

The research in this volume addresses several recurring topics in Romance Phonetics and Phonology with a special focus on the segment, syllable, word, and phrase levels of analysis. The original research presented in this volume ranges from the low-level mechanical processes involved in speech production and perception to high-level representation and computation. The interaction between these two dimensions of speech and their effects on first- and second-language acquisition are methodically treated in later chapters. Individual chapters address rhotics in various languages (Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese), both taps and trills, singleton and geminate; vowel nasalization and associated changes; sibilants and fricatives, the ways in which vowels are affected by their position; there are explorations of diphthongs and consonant clusters in Romanian; variant consonant production in three Catalan dialects; voice quality discrimination in Italian by native speakers of Spanish; mutual language perception by French and Spanish native speakers of each other’s language; poetry recitation (vis-à-vis rhotics in particular); French prosodic structure; glide modifications and pre-voicing in onsets in Spanish and Catalan; vowel reduction in Galician; and detailed investigations of bilinguals’ language acquisition. A number of experimental methods are employed to address the topics under study including both acoustic and articulatory data; electropalatography (EPG), ultrasound, electromagnetic articulography (EMA).