title: Lenition and phonemic overlap in Rome Italian.
abstract: The purpose of this paper is to offer acoustic evidence for an unusual phonemic contrast in Rome Italian. In our corpus, about half of all tokens of intervocalic /p t k/ are realized with uninterrupted voicing (both word-internally and across word boundaries). Furthermore, the voiced realizations of /t/ and /k/ do not significantly differ from /d/ and /g/ in duration and/or degree of constriction (as acoustically determined). Phonemic contrast is maintained under substantial phonetic overlap. Regarding the labials, duration keeps /p/ and /b/ apart. Contrary to the universal tendency, it is /b/ that is considerably longer, due to complex diachronic facts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. jihualde@illinois.edu
authors.forename: José Ignacio
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Hualde
authors.forename: Marianna
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nadeu
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D010699:Phonation; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics