LingLunch : Giusy Turco

Thursday 30 March 2017, 12:00 to 13:00
Organisation: 
Pascal Amsili (LLF)
Lieu: 

ODG – Salle du conseil (533)

Giusy Turco (LPP Paris 3)
Non-local anticipatory adjustments in speech production

Non-local anticipatory adjustments (or, coarticulation at distance) in speech production are often triggered by feature-based contrasts (as in vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, nasalization or labialization). Comparatively, poorly understood are effects caused by the temporal properties of a sound (prosody-based contrast) such as consonantal length contrast. The current talk will focus on non-local temporal adjustments before an upcoming length contrast in Italian minimal pairs that differ only in the length of the medial consonant (e.g., geminate word palla 'ball' vs. singleton word pala 'shovel'). This contrast is reportedly signalled by the duration of the singleton/geminate consonant and of the preceding vowel. Two acoustic studies will show that the duration adjustment extends further to the word-initial consonant (Experiment 1) and that it is not a by-product of syllable structure (Experiment 2). Implications for models of speech production are discussed.