Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Traditional grammars consider the presence of one segment marked [+high] and the presence of stress (lexical accent) on the contiguous [—high] vowel as the main factors responsible for diphthong realization in Italian; yet, they report that diphthongs also occur in unstressed contiguous vowels. These statements are considered here as the hypotheses to be investigated. Assuming that the gliding process of diphthongization involves shortening, durations of Italian vowels and vowel-like sounds in candidate diphthongs and nondiphthongs (i.e., vowel clusters) occurring in both stressed and unstressed sequences within word boundaries were measured in two different speech materials: (1) nonsense words embedded in sentence frames; (2) meaningful words in sentences. in both contexts, the test words contained pairs of contiguous vowels to be pronounced as a diphthong or as a vowel cluster, according to recognized Italian phonotactic possibilities. Results show the following: (1) in both corpora, segmental duration differences do not effectively characterize the realization of diphthongs and vowel clusters in stressed sequences, while in unstressed sequences there is a strong duration difference between a diphthong and the corresponding vowel cluster, but only in the onglide ([+high/-high]) case. (2) Vowel clusters appear to be articulated differently in meaningful sentences than in nonsense utterances, even when the speaker manages to maintain the same nominal speaking rate. These results will be applied in the text-to-speech synthesis of Italian which is now being developed.

Keywords

diphthongs vowel clusters Italian

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

BATTAGLIA, S. , and PERNICONE, V (1980). Grammatica Italiana. Torino: Loescher.

BERTINETTO, P.M. (1981). Strutture Prosodiche dell'Italiano. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.

BORZONE DE MANRIQUE, A.M. (1979). Acoustic analysis of the Spanish diphthongs. Phonetica, 36, 194–206.

CANEPARI, L. (1979). Introduzione alla Fonetica. Torino: Einaudi.

CANEPARI, L. (1983). Phonetic Notation. Venezia: Cafoscarina.

FARNETANI, E. , and KORI, S. (1982). Lexical stress in spoken sentences: A study on duration and vowel formant pattern. Quaderni del Centro di Studio per le Ricerche di Fonetica, 1, 104–133.

FAVA, E. , and MAGNO CALDOGNETTO, E. (1976). Studio sperimentale delle caratteristiche elettroacustiche delle vocali toniche e atone in bisillabi Italiani. In R. Simone , U. Vignuzzi , and G. Ruggiero (eds.), Studi di Fonetica e Fonologia (pp. 35–79). Roma: Bulzoni.

FERRERO, F.E. , MAGNO CALDOGNETTO, E. , VAGGES, K. , and LAVAGNOLI, C. (1978). Some acoustic characteristics of the Italian vowels. Journal of Italian Linguistics, 3, 87–96.

JHA, S.K. (1985). Acoustic analysis of the Maithili diphthongs. Journal of Phonetics, 13, 107–115.

10.

KLATT, D.H. (1973). Durational characteristics of prestressed word initial consonant clusters in English. Quarterly Progress Reports, (Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.), QPR 108, 253–260.

11.

KLATT, D.H. (1979). Synthesis by rule of segmental durations in English sentences. In B. Lindblom and S. Ohman (eds.), Frontiers of Speech Communication Research (pp. 287–300). New York: Academic Press.

12.

LEHISTE, I. , and PETERSON, G.E. (1961). Transitions, glides and diphthongs. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 33, 268–277.

13.

MAROTTA, G. (1984). Aspetti della Struttura Ritmico-temporale in Italiano: Studi sulla Durata Vocalica. Pisa: Editrice Tecnico Scientifica.

14.

MIGLIORINI, B. , TAGLIAVINI, C. , and FIORELLI, P. (1969). Dizionario d'Ortografia e Pronunzia. Torino: Edizioni RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana (New Edition).

15.

MULJACIC, Z. (1972). Fonologia della Lingua Italiana. Bologna: II Mulino.

16.

PETERSON, G.E. , and LEHISTE, I. (1960). Duration of syllable nuclei in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 32, 693–703.

17.

ROMEO, L. (1968). A phonemic inventory of the Italian bivocalic sequences. Forum Italicum, 2, 117–143.

18.

SALZA, P.L. (1987). On distributional properties of non-syllabic vowels in Italian words. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, XIX, 57–75.

19.

SALZA, P.L. , MAROTTA, G. , and RICCA, D. (1987). Duration and formant frequencies of Italian bivocalic sequences. Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Vol. 3 (pp. 113–116). Tallinn: Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR.

20.

SALZA, P.L. , and SANDRI, S. (1986). Consonant-to-vowel durational effects in Italian. Proceedings of the 12th International Congress on Acoustics, Vol. 1, A6–2. Toronto: Canadian Acoustical Association.

21.

SALZA, P.L. , SANDRI, S. , and FOTI, E. (1987). Evaluation of experimental diphones for text-to-speech synthesis of Italian. Proceedings of the European Conference on Speech Technology, Vol. 2 (pp. 63–66). Edinburgh: CEP Consultants Ltd.

22.

SKYTTE, G. (1975). Italiensk Phonetik. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag.

23.

TAGLIAVINI, C. , and MIONI, A.M. (1973). Cenni di Trascrizione Fonetica dell'Italiano. Bologna: Patron Editore.

24.

TOTSKAYA, N.I. (1987). The nature of the so-called non-syllabic vowels in the Ukrainian language. Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Vol. 3 (pp. 240–242). Tallinn: Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR.

25.

VAYRA, M. , AVESANI, C. , and FOWLER, C.A. (1984). Patterns of temporal compression in spoken Italian. In M.P.R. Van den Broecke and A. Cohen (eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 541–546). Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

26.

WELKOWITZ, J. , EWEN, R. , and COHEN, J. (1982). Introductory Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Durations of Italian Diphthongs and Vowel Clusters

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References