Non-local duration differences caused by consonantal length contrasts

Abstract

Our study deals with the durational structure of Italian words with a medial geminate or singleton consonant (e.g., palla “ball” vs. pala “shovel”). Specifically, we investigated the duration of the word-initial consonant (e.g., [p]) and found that the onset consonant was longer in geminate than in singleton words. A comparison to German word pairs with a vowel length contrast in the first syllable (e.g., bitten “please” vs. bieten “bed”) showed no such duration increase for the word-initial consonant [b]. On the basis of previous studies on long-distance anticipatory effects, we argue that the strength of the geminate articulation in Italian is already foreshadowed in the word-initial consonant, whereas the German vowel length contrast does not lead to such anticipatory duration differences. Our results hence provide evidence for a distinction between consonantal and vocalic subsystems for a different set of data.