The Phonetics and Phonology of Glottalization in Italian

This book combines theoretical and experimental approaches to provide a comprehensive account of glottalization in word-final syllables in Italian. The speech production study at the heart of the book sheds light on the source of glottalization, the contextual factors determining its occurrence, and the acoustic correlates which characterize its production.

Acoustic analysis of words presenting evidence of glottalization is carried out through visual inspection of the acoustic signal together with spectral analysis of voice quality. Statistical analysis of the data in the study is performed using mixed effects models, as well as tree-based methods including conditional inference trees and random forests. Results of the study have implications for cross-linguistic studies on voice quality.