Sociophonetic Variation and Change in Heritage Languages: Lexical Effects in Heritage Italian Aspiration of Voiceless Stops.
Chiara Celata, Naomi Nagy
PMID 36250624WHAT IT FOUND
In heritage Italian speech, English-like aspiration grew across generations and followed word frequency.
Calabrian aspiration stayed common across generations but did not follow word frequency.
Key findings
01English-like aspiration in stressed syllables increased across generations: 11% of CV́ lemmas were perceived as aspirated in Gen 1, 28% in Gen 2, and 59% in Gen 3.
02Calabrian sociophonetic aspiration in unstressed syllables was perceived in 91% of Gen 1 lemmas, then 57% in Gen 2 and 59% in Gen 3.
03Lexical frequency was a significant predictor of English-like aspiration and VOT in the CV́ subset, but no frequency measure was significant in the C.CV subset.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The analysis used excerpts from 23 speakers, so it describes one heritage Calabrian Italian community in Toronto, not all heritage Italian speakers. The speech samples were sociolinguistic interviews, so the two aspiration contexts were not balanced; the CV́ subset had 1,942 occurrences and the C.CV subset had 1,382. 135 tokens (2.7% of the dataset) were removed because annotators did not agree on perceived aspiration. Frequency effects in the CV́ subset were small, and some apparent lexical patterns depended on hapax or low-frequency lemmas. English-like aspiration in Gen 3 was still not as frequent as would be found in English.
Declared interests
The HLVC Project was funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants 410-2009-2330 and 435-2016-1430.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the Gen 3 rise in English-like aspiration as evidence that heritage speakers have acquired English-like aspiration at English levels; Gen 3 speakers were found to aspirate more frequently than the other groups, but nowhere near as frequently as would be found in English.