Two types of consonant gemination characterize Italian: lexical and syntactic. Italian is contrastive, so that two words may differ by only one geminated consonant. In contrast, syntactic occurs across word boundaries, affects the initial a in specific contexts, such as presence monosyllabic morpheme before word. This study investigates acoustic correlates gemination, asking if for are similar ...

Swedish is a quantity language and there is a distinction between phonologically long and short vowels in the stressed syllable. In addition, there is a complementary relation between the vowel and the immediately following consonant – the consonant being short whenever the vowel is long (V:C) and long (VC:) or part of a consonant cluster (e.g. VCC) when the vowel is short (Elert, 1964). In oth...

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Swedish is a quantity language and there is a distinction between phonologically long and short vowels in the stressed syllable. In addition, there is a complementary relation between the vowel and the immediately following consonant – the consonant being short whenever the vowel is long (V:C) and long (VC:) or part of a consonant cluster (e.g. VCC) when the vowel is short (Elert, 1964). In oth...

Gemination in loanwords is a cross-linguistically widespread phenomenon: a singleton consonant in the source word is geminated in the loanword, even if the doubling does not have an orthographic reflex (that is, the geminated consonant is spelt with a single consonant letter in the source word). Source languages which these words are borrowed from do not allow phonetic geminates. Some examples ...

1 The consonant approximation problem Given a belief function b ∈ B and a sub-class of b.f.s A, the problem consists on finding the function a ∈ A which the " closest " to b, according to some criterion (for instance by minimizing a certain distance function d(a, b)). 1.1 Previous solutions 1.2 Paper outline 2 Geometry of consonant belief functions 2.1 Consonant belief functions The theory of e...

PURPOSE The goal of this study was to ascertain the effect of changes in stress and speech rate on vowel coarticulation in vowel-consonant-vowel sequences. METHOD Data on second formant coarticulatory effects as a function of changing /i/ versus /a/ were collected for five Catalan speakers' productions of vowel-consonant-vowel sequences with the fixed vowels /i/ and /a/ and consonants: the ap...