Acoustic description of aspirated voiceless stops

A sociophonetic analysis of Calabrian adolescents' regional Italian

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of internal and external factors triggering aspiration of voiceless stops in the Regional Italian spoken by a group of adolescents from central Calabria. The results showed that variation in VOT duration has both phonetic and extra-linguistic explanations. The findings showed that aspiration is generally favoured in velar and poststress stops. At the same time, individual speakers show fine-grained differences in the realization of aspiration as a function of their social characteristics. In particular, a significant effect of the attitude towards schooling, with males with a negative attitude showing significantly longer VOT, was found.