Haskins Publications

Number	1140
Year	1999
Drawer	21
Entry Date	12/03/1999
Authors	Vayra, M., Avesani, C. & Fowler, C.A.
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Publication	Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, (pp.495-498). San Francisco, CA.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1140.pdf
Abstract	This study focuses on the temporal organization of consonants and vowels in Italian, ostensibly a syllable-timed language, It aims to reveal the articulatory origins of a class of acoustic shortening phenomena known as “compensatory”. We compared durations and first format trajectories of /a/ in two compensatory contexts: 1) stressed /a/ in open vs. closed syllables; 2) stressed /a/ followed by one or two unstressed syllables. In addition, we measured /a/ in a prosodically different shortening context: stressed vs. unstressed position. We found that in Italian (as in English) shortening of a vowel before a tautosyllablic consonant is due to truncation by the closing gesture for the consonant. However, shortening due to destressing involves global reduction of the opening gesture. The similarity between these findings and those on English suggests a fundamental similarity in this aspect of their timing differences.
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