The effect of minimal neighbors on acoustic detail in the production or real and nonce words in Italian

Previous research on English demonstrated that the existence of minimal neighbors in the lexicon can lead to the enhancement of the differentiating acoustic property, such as Voice Onset Time (VOT) in voiceless stops (Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009). In this study, the effect of minimal lexical neighbors (e.g., cara “dear” is a minimal neighbor for gara “match”) on the acoustic realization of voicing and gemination was examined in real and nonce words in Italian. Thirty native speakers of Tuscan Italian read one of the two stimuli lists, one containing only geminated and voiced stimuli and the other containing only singleton and voiceless stimuli, such that a given participant was never exposed to both members of a minimal pair. The results showed that real words with minimal neighbors had longer negative VOT if voiced or positive VOT if voiceless than real words without minimal neighbors. However, the existence of a real minimal neighbor did not affect VOT duration in nonce words. Analysis of nasal and voiceless stop geminates is ongoing.