Phonetic detail in Italian homophonic simplex and complex words

This study investigates whether Italian speakers encode varying degrees of morphological complexity of the homophonous sequences /stra/ and /ino/ through acoustic variation in production. Specifically, we compare the duration of /stra/ and /ino/ sequences when they are part of simplex words (e.g., strategico ‘strategic’, destino ‘destiny’), productive affixes in transparent derivatives with an evaluative meaning (e.g., strabello ‘extremely nice’, gattino ‘small cat’), and affixes in more opaque and lexicalized derivatives with non-evaluative meaning (e.g., straripa ‘it overflows’ , postino ‘mailman’). We find that morphemic /stra/ in transparent derivatives is systematically longer than the non-morphemic homophone, while the difference is not significant for /ino/. Within morphologically complex words, the more predictable the association of the affix with its base, the shorter the duration of the affix. We explain these results in terms of how easily the speakers associate specific meanings with given phonological forms.