Rosa versus rossa: The acquisition of Italian geminates by native speakers of Dutch

This study examines to what extent native speakers of Dutch, who are beginning learners of Italian, have acquired the perception and production of the Italian contrast between singleton and geminate consonants. In Italian, but not in Dutch, consonants can be phonemically long and minimal pairs like dita (‘fingers’) – ditta (‘company’) differ only in the singleton vs. geminate character of the consonant. The results of an AXB discrimination task and a word-reading task revealed that learners were able to perceive the distinction between singletons and geminates and produced longer closure/frication durations for geminate than for singleton consonants. In addition, just like native speakers, they produced significantly longer vowels preceding singletons than preceding geminates. However, the distribution of individual tokens showed a considerable overlap between the singleton and the geminate category. The results confirm Mah & Archibald’s (2003) hypothesis that learners may redeploy a familiar native language length contrast in vowels in the context of consonants, but may fail to phonetically implement the contrast in a native-like way.