The first study investigates non-local temporal adjustments before an upcoming length contrast in Italian and in Japanese minimal pairs that differ only in the length of the medial consonant (e.g. geminate word 'palla' meaning 'ball’ vs. the non-geminate word 'pala' - ‘shovel’).
Results show that:
-The duration adjustment extends further to the word-initial consonant, e.g. the [p] in palla is significantly longer than that in pala.
-This lengthening is unique to geminates (cluster do not have such lengthening).
These results have been for instance published in:
1. Turco, G., Braun, B. (2016) An acoustic study on non-local anticipatory effects of Italian length contrast. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(4), 2247-2256.
The second set of studies (see references 2/3 below) replies to the question of why binary contrast is prevalently binary in world’s languages.
This question has been addressed by looking at poorly investigated languages such as Moroccan Arabic.
Main results show that in production speakers have a clear preference for a binary length contrast: Because it involves too much crowding in the consonant duration space, it is expected that no language may have a four-level length contrast.
2. Turco, G., Shoul, K. Ridouane, R. (2017) How are four-level length distinctions produced? Evidence from Moroccan Arabic. Proceedings of the INTERSPEECH conference, August 20-24, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 215-218.
3. Turco, G. Ridouane, R. (in prep.) Why is length contrast prevalently binary? J
The third set of studies focuses on factors that have an impact on the production of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (also ‘vowel height harmony’) in French.
Main results show that:
- French vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is affected by prosodic position: the stronger the prosodic position, the less coarticulation there is between the two non-adjacent vowels.
- Speech style differences are found to have a more subtle effect on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation that the one described in the literature.
4. Turco, G., Fougeron, C., Audibert, N. (2016a) Que nous apprennent les gros corpus sur l'harmonie vocalique en français. Proceeding of the 31st of the conference JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016 (volume 1: JEP). Paris, July 4-8, 571-579.
5. Turco, G., Fougeron, C., Audibert, N. (2016b) The Effects of Prosody on French V-to-V Coarticulation: A Corpus-Based Study. Proceedings of the INTERSPEECH conference 2016, San Francisco, September 8-12, 998-1001.
6. Turco, G., Guitard-Ivent, F., Fougeron, C. (in press) Speech style effects on non-local and local coarticulation in French. Springer LNCS Series.
Another set of studies has focused on anticipation in speech planning and processing based on other acoustic cues of speech - namely, pitch - besides duration.
The main results of these studies suggest that language users can rely on those cues to anticipate their message content and to process upcoming information in speech.
7. Grillo, N., Turco, G. (2016) Prosodic ambiguation and attachment height. Speech Prosody 8, May 2016, Boston, United States. pp.1176-1180.
8. Turco, G., Zerbian, S. (submitted) Testing for processing advantages of linguistic effects of focus in L1 and L2.
