LingLunch: Johanna Cronenberg (LLF)

Johanna Cronenberg (LLF): Duration as a cue to the diphthong-hiatus contrast in four Romance languages: Lessons from large, uncontrolled data 

Romance languages are known to vary in the way vowel sequences are parsed. According to phonological and historical accounts, the vowel sequence /ia/ is always classified as a hiatus (i.e., two full vowels) in Portuguese whereas it is always classified as a diphthong (i.e., a semi-vowel /j/ followed by the full vowel /a/) in Italian. In Spanish and Romanian, both categories exist. This typology is supported by small amounts of controlled data recorded under laboratory conditions. In this study, we test whether the language-specific diphthong-hiatus distinction is upheld in continuous speech, using duration measurements for more than 88,000 tokens of /ia/ retrieved from large speech corpora. Our findings align with the expectation that the hiatus is longer than the diphthong as well as with the proposed typology of the four Romance languages. However, our results also extend previous studies in several ways because, given the large amount of data, we are able to provide more nuanced comparisons of the impact of additional factors, such as lexical stress and position within the word, on the diphthong-hiatus contrast. We will discuss how to complete the picture of that contrast using further acoustic and perceptual measurements.