Lexical Stress and Velar Palatalization in Italian: A spatio-temporal Interaction

Palatalization is the process whereby a velar stop is fronted to a palatal affricate or fricative. In Italian, it takes place at the boundary between the root and /i/ suffixes. In nouns and adjectives, palatalization occurs in words with antepenultimate stress ([ˈko.mi.t͡ʃi]), while it is much rarer in words with penultimate stress ([ka.ˈdu.ki]) Based on one acoustic and one articulatory study (EMA), we postulate that the resistance of post-tonic /k, g/ to palatalize is related to the stressed vowel directly preceding. In the acoustic domain, post-tonic consonants show longer closure duration. This increase in closure duration is directly related to a larger and longer tongue dorsum movement in the articulatory domain. We show an interaction between temporal (closure duration) and spatial (tongue dorsum displacement) aspects of lexical stress, which we interpret as the cause of resistance to palatalization in post-tonic velars. The findings are discussed within the μ-gesture framework.