The phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants: A production study

Geminate consonants in Finnish and Italian were studied for the purposes of learning how the production of geminates is related to that of single consonants, of seeing whether geminates are produced identically in languages with different phonological structures, and of determining what the timing of geminates relative to surrounding vowels reveals about the timing organization of the languages. The framework adopted for discussion is articulatory phonology.;Native speakers of Italian and of Finnish produced intervocalic single and geminate bilabial consonants and related clusters in their respective languages. Lip movement and speech were recorded simultaneously, then analyzed separately as acoustic and lip aperture data. Acoustic analysis defined the durational properties of geminates and showed that the shortening of vowels before geminates, long observed in Italian, occurs weakly in Finnish when the preceding vowel is long and does not occur when the preceding vowel is short. Movement data showed that geminate closure kinematics are different in the two languages, indicating that geminates are produced differently in the two cases. It is likely that Italian geminates are produced as a sequentially overlapping pair of identical single-consonant gestures. In Finnish there is no evidence of overlap, and it is likely that the geminate consonant is produced as a single distinct gesture.;Italian movement data showed that early initiation of the closing gesture for the geminate accounts for the vowel shortening before geminates and for the differences that occur between singles and geminates in the kinematics of gestural closing, and helps maintain a stable interval between succeeding vowels. In Finnish no stable interval between vowels is maintained, and the timing of consonant gestures with respect to surrounding vowels appears to be local, with no governing rhythm maintained by regularity of vowel production.