Research

Ongoing Projects

DID - New Perspectives on Diphthong Dynamics

  • Funded by: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Autonomous Province of Bozen Unit 34
  • Project duration: 2023-2026

Project website

Overview The overarching objective of our proposal is to further our understanding of the inner temporal dynamics of diphthongs across a range of diphthongs and for two different languages. Despite diphthongs being part of many vowel inventories in the world’s languages, there is a dearth of knowledge about what the defining characteristics of diphthongs are and how to capture theoretically and empirically their oscillating identity between unity (single unit) and duality (sequence of two units). Our proposed work will capitalize on the diphthong inventories of Tyrolean and Sardinian, as well as on recent advances in data quantification methods in the phonetic sciences to significantly deepen our knowledge of diphthong dynamics in speech production. Tyrolean and Sardinian are well suited as objects of investigation due to their rich but contrasting diphthong inventories comprising presumably structurally different diphthong types.

Our work carries innovative potential in several aspects: For one, we provide the first comprehensive phonetic description of the vowel inventories of two phonetically understudied languages, including their numerous diphthongs. We will acoustically record the vowel inventory (monophthongs and diphthongs) for Tyrolean as spoken in the city of Meran and for the Cagliari Campidanese variety of Sardinian, and endangered language. We will record 40 speakers per language, divided into two age groups to be able to observe possible ongoing sound changes. Secondly, we will exploit sate-of-the art statistical techniques for the analysis of time series data to study the inner temporal structure of the diphthongs of these two languages under varying prosodic conditions. These analyses are designed to open new vistas on the question whether diphthongs can be understood as a sequence of two vocalic gestures, coarticulated to varying degrees, or whether the target of diphthong production is a dynamic transitional movement through the vowel space. Thirdly, we will make available to the scientific community a database with our recordings, as well as speech technological tools – trained models for automatic segmentation – that will facilitate future research on these languages.

Project Members

Alessandro Vietti (co-PI) Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Marianne Pouplier (co-PI) Ludwig Maximilians Universität München

Andrea Brugnoli (Post-Doc Researcher) Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Aleese Block (Post-Doc Researcher) Ludwig Maximilians Universität München

Daniela Mereu (Scientific Consultant) University of Turin

Completed Projects

Speak Up! – The effects of temperature and altitude on speech and articulation

  • Funded by: Free University of Bozen – Bolzano, Faculty of Education
  • Project duration: 2018 – 2020

The aim of this project is to study the effect of environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, pressure, or oxygen level on speech.

Many aspects of speech are determined by physiological characteristics (e.g. size of vocal tract, age), but there are also situational factors, such as different kinds of stress (e.g. background noise, cognitive work load, emotion). One of the less studied factors that might induce stress and affect speech are environmental factors like temperature, humidity or atmospheric pressure. Some studies have looked at the effect of humidity and temperature on vocal fold activity in terms of phonation threshold pressure or phonatory effort which can be related to voice quality.

However, less is known how these factors affect supraglottal articulation and general speech patterns. For example, cooling of muscles through exposure to cold air affects physical performance, particularly fast movements, which might consequently affect the ability to control lip, jaw or even tongue movement. Speakers might also adapt their articulation patterns to prevent too much cold or dry air to enter the vocal tract and affect the vocal folds.

Although not much is known about the direct effect of environmental factors on speech, several studies have drawn connections between geographic or climatic factors and phonological inventories of languages based on typological information obtained in data bases, claiming that over a course of time some environments might be more likely to give rise to certain phonologic features.

The project will explore how speakers react to different environmental factors by analyzing acoustic and articulatory data and contribute to the existing research on mechanisms responsible for language variation.

Project Members

Alessandro Vietti

Lia Saki Bučar Shigemori

Publications

Bučar Shigemori, L. S. and Vietti, Alessandro 2019. Acoustic analysis of Italian singleton/geminate stop production in two ambient temperature conditions. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 3676-3680). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc. See publication

NEB – Networks, Exemplars and Bilinguals. The potential of quantitative social network analysis in sociophonetic research

  • Funded by: Free University of Bozen – Bolzano, Faculty of Education
  • Project duration: 2018 – 2020

Overview

NEB – Networks, Exemplars and Bilinguals. The potential of quantitative social network analysis in sociophonetic research is a project aimed at exploring how social interactions with other people influence our way of speaking.

The focus of the project is concerned with one of the crucial questions in language sciences: how does social experience affect human speech communication?

Speakers are constantly updating their sound system to make it more similar to the speech of the ambient community. Likewise, bilinguals experience pronunciation changes in both languages as a result of a differential use of the two languages.

The main aim of NEB is to study the effects of personal network structure on bilingual’s linguistic behavior, focusing on how social experience counts as essential structuring force to phonological categories. In order to explore this issues, we will analyze spontaneous data coming from a sample of bilingual speakers from Bolzano.

Project Members

Alessandro Vietti

Daniela Mereu

Presentations

Mereu D. & Vietti A. (2019), “La creazione di un corpus di parlato spontaneo dialogico: l’italiano di Bolzano”. Oral presentation at the Workshop “Corpora di parlato: verso l’individuazione di pratiche condivise”, LIII International Congress of the Italian Linguistics Society (Società di Linguistica Italiana), Como, Italy.

Vietti, A. & Mereu, D. (2020), “Sistemi vocalici in contatto nell’italiano di Bolzano: un’analisi esplorativa corpus-based”. Oral presentation at the XVI International Conference of AISV Associazione Italiana Scienze della Voce, Università della Calabria, Rende (CS).

Publications

Mereu, D. & Vietti, A. (2020), “Studiare la variazione fonetica nel parlato spontaneo dialogico: il corpus DIA (Dialogical ItAlian)”. Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia 44: 71-87.

Vietti, A. & Mereu, D. (2020), “Sistemi vocalici in contatto nell’italiano di Bolzano: un’analisi esplorativa corpus-based”. In: Romito, L. (ed.), La variazione linguistica in condizioni di contatto: contesti acquisizionali, lingue, dialetti e minoranze in Italia e nel mondo. Milano: Officinaventuno, 125-144. See publication

Mereu, D. & Vietti, A. (2021), “Dialogic ItAlian: the creation of a corpus of Italian spontaneous speech”. Speech Communication 130: 1-14. See publication

SCUTI – Sibilant clusters in bilingual speakers: a UTI-based approach

  • Funded by: Free University of Bozen, ZeFo call, 2016-2017
  • Project duration: 01.01.2016 – 01.03.2017

The research project aimed to carry out an investigation of bilinguals’ speech, which was based on articulatory data collected by means of the ultrasound tongue imaging technique. The objective was to compare the syllabic status of consonant clusters in the productions of Italian/Tyrolean adult bilingual speakers based on gestural coordination patterns (Browman & Goldstein 1988). We intended to assess whether in the speech of bilinguals, where the syllabification of some phonetic string is different in their two languages, two different timing patterns for the same sequence of consonants are used.

CUSCUS – Lingual coarticulation in preschoolers and school aged children

  • Funded by: Free University of Bozen, RTD call, 2016-2017
  • Project duration: 01.02.2016 – 31.05.2017

The aim of this study was to gather data on the development of lingual coarticulatory patterns in children. In particular, the goal was to gather acoustic and articulatory information that allow documentation of how coarticulation mechanism mature in preschoolers and school-aged children in the process of learning their first language. More specifically, the focus was on the acquisition of lingual coarticulation patterns in Italian speaking children using the ultrasound tongue imaging technique. To my knowledge, this was the first study focusing on the collection of direct evidence of lingual coarticulation in Italian speaking children.

CItaBol – Corpus di Italiano a Bolzano

  • Funded by: Free University of Bozen, Faculty of Education
  • Project duration: 01.02.2016 – 31.05.2017

The main aim of the project was the creation of a corpus of Italian spoken in Bozen-Bolzano by Italian speakers. The relevance of the project was connected on one side to the multilingual context of South Tyrol, and, on the other side, by the lack of a clear definition of this variety of Italian in the previous studies. The corpus was balanced according to the main sociolinguistic variables. The final purpose of this project was indeed to have a corpus of spoken Italian socially stratified, and with a focus on variation between careful and spontaneous speech, and on apparent-time diachrony.

TUTIP – The Articulatory Sociophonetics of Bilinguals in South Tyrol – The Ultrasound Tongue Imaging Potential

  • Funded by: Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano – Alto Adige, Ripartizione allo studio, Università e ricerca scientifica
  • Project duration : 2013 – 2016

This research project was a continuation of the previous one. The main aim of this project was to carry out a sociophonetic investigation of bilinguals’ speech, based on articulatory data collected by means of the ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) technique. We investigated the speech production of simultaneous bilinguals born and grew up in bilingual South Tyrol, thus meaning adults who have been exposed to the two languages spoken in this area -namely German and Italian- since they were born. In addition, we also considered early and late sequential bilinguals as well as monolinguals in the same two languages German and Italian, who constituted the control group. Our main objective was to study the variation of articulatory patterns in the two languages as a function of bilingual competence and language exposure.

FONAA – Fonetica e fonologia in Alto Adige – Un corpus plurilingue e multicanale per la ricerca fonologica sulle lingue in Alto Adige

  • Funded by: Free University of Bozen, Faculty of Education
  • Project duration: 2010 – 2012

This project aimed at creating a multilingual corpus on languages of Alto Adige/South Tyrol for phonological research. The main goals achieved with this project were: the preparation of the environmental and technical conditions for data collection and acoustic analysis by means of Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI); the development of the techniques of articulatory data acquisition; the definition of the methodologies for data elicitation; the creation of the transcription conventions for acoustic data; the development of the annotation scheme for articulatory phonetic data. With this project, we set up the laboratory of phonetics (ALPS), specialized in Ultrasound Tongue Imaging technique.

Phonetic systems in interaction: Instrumental phonetics description of rhotics in South-Tyrolean Italian

  • Funded by: Free University of Bozen, Faculty of Education
  • Project duration: 2009 – 2010

This research focused on the sociophonetic variation of different phonetic realizations of /r/ in South-Tyrol Italian speech by applying an experimental-phonetic approach. In this perspective, the main aim was to provide a first contribution to the exploration of /r/ phonetic variation in a complex situation of language contact. The most interesting results of the project concerned the phonetic research methodology of language contact and bilingualism with particular reference to the application of the Ultrasound Tongue Imaging technique on the bilinguals’ speech.