Phonetic and Prosodic Properties of World’s Languages

The team of this research area within the Department is currently involved in a set of quantitative studies of phonetic and phonological aspects of languages and dialects spoken worldwide. Instrumental (acoustic and articulatory) techniques are applied to the study of phonetic variation and a selection of specific pronunciation conditions are described in reference to a traditional IPA-oriented approach.

Linguistic rhythm and general timing properties are highlighted by means of locally developed tools whereas other prosodic features are accounted for with original assessment methods which have been adopted by the AMPER project.

Vocal profiles of speakers are also studied as well as sociolinguistic variables which show a relationship with pronunciation preferences. Immigrant languages and interference conditions are more recently investigated  by some researchers of the team, while others are now interested in clinical linguistics and speech technologies.

Research fields:

·   Sounds inventories of world’s languages (in spoken corpora);

·   Phonetic properties of Italian and the dialects of Italy (articulatory and acoustic account);

·   Geo- and socio-phonetic variability in r-sounds;

·   Prosody (tools and strategies for the analysis of linguistic rhythm and intonation);

·   Instabilities in vowel realisations;

·   Consonant gemination;

·   Linguistic properties of minority languages in Italy;

·   Phonetic properties of Italian as spoken by Immigrants and L2 learners;

·   Applied phonetics (Tools for IPA transcription and Language teaching, Language Technologies).

International Partnerships:

Associated to the AMPER (Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman) network (Universidade de Aveiro - Portogallo, LIMSI-CNRS - Orsay/Centre de Dialectologie Université Stendhal de Grenoble 3 - Francia, Universidad de la Laguna(Tenerife)/Universidad de Deusto/Universidad de Valladolid/