Research topics
I. Gemination in Italian
Gemination can be defined as the clustering of a single consonant into a 'double' or geminate consonant. This phenomenon plays a major role in Italian, a language in which several words change their meaning as a function of the presence or absence of gemination of one consonant in the word. Most often in Italian these words are disyllabic ones forming minimal pairs, with the stress placed on the first syllable of the word. However, gemination can also be observed across words of a same sentence.
Native Italian speakers exhibit a natural attitude in producing disyllabic words of minimal pairs identified by the presence or absence of consonant gemination. Words belonging to minimal pairs are orthographically distinguished by a double grapheme of the geminate consonant (for example: micia (pussy-cat) and miccia (fuse), or casa (house) and cassa (box)). A problem, which is still unsolved, regards the identification of acoustic correlates of singleton vs. geminates, and their perceptual verification.
The Gemination project GEMMA, started at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy, in 1992, examines gemination in Italian. The analyzed consonants are stops, liquids, fricatives, nasals, and affricates. Partial results were previously reported for stops in
(Esposito and Di Benedetto, 1999) showing how gemination is revealed by time-related parameters, namely, the consonant lengthening and the preconsonant vowel shortening in geminate forms.
Relevance of acoustic correlates was confirmed by perceptual experiments.
The GEMMA project was recently revived, and the database used for the analysis was made available at the following
link.
M.-G. Di Benedetto and L. De Nardis, Consonant gemination in Italian: the nasal and liquid case, submitted to Speech Communication, 2019.
M.-G. Di Benedetto and L. De Nardis, Consonant gemination in Italian: the affricate and fricative case, submitted to Speech Communication, 2019.
A. Esposito and M. G. Di Benedetto,
"Acoustic and perceptual study of gemination in Italian stops", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. vol. 106, n. 4, Pt. 1, pp. 2051–2062, October 1999.