An articulatory account of rhotic variation in Tuscan Italian: synchronized UTI and EPG data

Rhotic variation in a spoken variety of Tuscan Italian is investigated. The paper takes a multi-level articulatory approach, based on real-time synchronization and analysis of acoustic, electropalatographic (EPG) and ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) data. Contrary to the expectations based on the received dialectological literature, it emerges that speakers produce various alveolar variants: taps, trills, fricatives and approximant realizations. To examine the factors that may constrain the variation of /r/, a multiple correspondence analysis is carried out. The result is that there are significant associations between the phonetic properties of /r/ variants and their preferred contexts of occurrence. A particular focus is then placed on the articulatory properties of the singleton-geminate distinction. It is shown that the length contrast is maintained but contrary to expectations trills are not primarily used for geminates. Instead, each speaker differentiates the singleton from the geminate according to a variety of production strategies.