Brief introduction
Within linguistics, my main areas of research are phonology and
phonetics. I’m particularly interested in the interaction between these two
components , i.e., how phonological information can influence a given phonetic
process and how phonetic detail can affect phonological phenomena. The
following is a summary of my specific areas of research. For more details,
please have a look at my CV, which contains downloadable material.
Length
contrast
I’m currently working on the behavior of vowel length contrasts
with respect to the Phonetics/Phonology interaction. Length is taken as the
phonological counterpart of duration. Thus, the focus is on phenomena where
duration plays a role, either at the phonological or the phonetic level. So
far, I have studied a number of different processes. These are the voicing
effect, Italian Raddoppiamento and compensatory lengthening.
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Voicing effect:
The term voicing effect refers to the tendency of vowels to be
shorter before voiceless obstruents than before voiced ones. There is a large
amount of literature on this effect. Here, I focus on the interaction between
the voicing effect and contrastive vowel length.
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Italian Raddoppiamento:
Italian Raddoppiamento is a process by which, given two
consecutive words, when the first word ends in a stressed vowel, the initial
consonant of the following word gets lengthened. In my study, I explore the
effect of intonational phrase boundaries and segment identity on the degree of
lengthening.
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Compensatory Lengthening:
Compensatory lengthening occurs in cases where deletion of a
segment is accompanied by lengthening of a neighboring element. I consider
mainly cases of compensatory consonant lengthening. Following a typological
approach, I propose different analyses (phonologization and perceived
similarity) for some instances of compensatory lengthening that seem unexpected
given the typological generalizations.
Minimal
contrast:
I’m interested in the role of minimal contrast both in
phonological and phonetic phenomena. Minimal contrast is found where two
elements differ in just one dimension of contrast. For instance long /a:/ and
short /a/ differ only in length and consequently, they minimally contrast for
length. Experimental results show that minimal length contrasts can influence
the outcome of a phonetic process, e.g. the voicing effect (see above). Furthermore,
some phonological phenomena seem to be sensitive to minimal contrast. We find
such an example if the metaphony patterns of certain Asturian dialects. In view
of these findings, I claim that information about minimal contrasts need to be
included in the phonological representation. I develop a system of
contrast-coindexing that represents this kind of contrast. I focus mainly on length contrast. Thus, my
proposal dispensing with moraic representation as a means to capture length
contrast.
Basque:
I’m interested in the
sound pattern of Basque and its allophonic phenomena. I study mainly the
southern Bizkaian dialect.