As a matter of fact, most Italian consonants can be geminated in intervocalic position, with the exception of a few such as /z/, although different experts of Italian phonology hold contrasting views regarding a particular subset of five consonants /ts, dz, ʃ, ɲ, λ/. This is the case in Italian for most consonants: stop consonants as well as a subset of nasals and fricatives. In Italian-see the examples above-when a geminate consonant appears within a word, it is usually orthographically transcribed as two consecutive graphemes of the same consonant. This suggests that syntactic gemination occurs during a post-lexical phase of production planning, after timing has already been established. The second burst, when present, is accommodated within the closure interval in syntactic geminates, while lexical geminates are lengthened by the extra burst. Moreover, the timing of these bursts suggests a different planning process for lexical vs syntactic geminates. Results also revealed the presence, in about 10%–12% of instances, of a double stop-release burst, providing strong support for the biphonematic nature of Italian geminated stop consonants. Results confirmed previous studies showing that duration is a prominent gemination cue, with a lengthened consonant closure and a shortened pre-consonant vowel for both types. This study investigates the acoustic correlates of Italian lexical and syntactic gemination, asking if the correlates for the two types are similar in the case of stop consonants. In contrast, syntactic gemination occurs across word boundaries and affects the initial consonant of a word in specific contexts, such as the presence of a monosyllabic morpheme before the word. Italian lexical gemination is contrastive, so that two words may differ by only one geminated consonant. The findings indicate that a feature occurring later in the word affects initial consonant production and perception, which supports the whole-word phonology model.Two types of consonant gemination characterize Italian: lexical and syntactic. Familiar words with geminates were recognized despite the change, words with singletons were not. We first established baseline word-form recognition for untrained familiar trochaic disyllables and then tested for word-form recognition, separately for words with geminates and singletons, after changing the initial consonant to create nonwords from both familiar and rare forms. To test the hypothesis that it is the salience of the medial geminate that detracts attention from the initial consonant we conducted three experiments with 11-month-old Italian infants. A production study with thirty Italian children recorded at 1 3 and 1 9 strongly confirmed both of these tendencies. Infants learning languages with long consonants, or geminates, have been found to "overselect" and "overproduce" these consonants in early words and also to commonly omit the word-initial consonant.
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