Romance Phonetics and Phonology

This volume explores several recurring topics in Romance phonetics and phonology, with a special focus on the segment, syllable, word, and phrase levels of analysis. An international team of experts and junior researchers present research that ranges from the low-level mechanical processes involved in speech production and perception to high-level representation and computation, based on data from across the Romance language family, including from varieties that are less widely studied.

The book is divided into five parts. In the first, chapters present acoustic studies, examining topics such as Italian anaphonesis and voiceless fricative sibilants in Galician, while chapters in part two turn to articulatory studies of features including three-consonant onsets in Romanian and rhotic variation in Tuscan Italian. The focus of the third part is perception, and includes studies of perceived phrasing in French and perceptual cues for individual voice quality, while part four examines phonological issues such as Galician mid-vowel reduction and sibilant voicing in Spanish. Chapters in the final part of the volume look at the effects of production and perception on issues in language acquisition. The book draws on a range of experimental and methodological approaches and will be of interest not only to scholars of Romance linguistics but also to all those working in phonetics and phonology from graduate level upwards.

Mark Gibson is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Speech Laboratory at the University of Navarra. His research focuses on articulatory timing in syllables from a Laboratory Phonology perspective. He is the author of An Introduction to Spanish Phonology: From an Optimality-Theoretical Approach (VDM, 2011) and of numerous journal articles in English, Spanish, and French.

Juana Gil is currently Director of the Instituto Cervantes in Lyon, having previously held positions at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and at UNED, the Spanish open university. She also founded the Postgraduate Program in Speech Sciences organized by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). She is mainly interested in the phonetics-phonology interface and in some applications of phonetics, such forensic phonetics and second language pronunciation learning and teaching. She is the co-editor, with Ricardo Mairal, of Linguistic Universals (CUP, 2006).