TOWARDS A PHONETIC CONSPECTUS OF PREASPIRATION: ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE FROM SIENESE ITALIAN

Mary Stevens & John Hajek
School of Languages & Linguistics, University of Melbourne

ID 1319
[full paper]

Preaspiration, i.e. [hC], is a rare feature of stop production in the world’s languages that has been recently found to occur in Sienese Italian. We present a qualitative acoustic-phonetic description of voiceless geminate stops /p: t: k:/ with preaspiration that occurred in a corpus of spontaneous Sienese Italian speech (6 ss). We outline the different fine-grained realizations of preaspiration and discuss the findings in the context of our general knowledge of the phenomenon across languages