Rhotic degemination in Rome Italian

In this paper we analyse if, and how, Rome speakers produce rhotics degemination in Rome Italian (RI). Ten speakers from Rome participated in a sentence-reading task, with 70 sentences of equal length and controlled prosodic contour, containing one token with a singleton and/or geminate /r/, in a stressed and/or unstressed condition. Seven hundred tokens were annotated classifying rhotics as either taps, trills, approximants or fricatives according to their spectrogram realization. For quantitative analysis, we relied on preceding vowel and consonant duration to test the consonant gemination. Results show that geminated rhotics were longer than singleton rhotics, whereas vowels preceding geminates are considerably shorter than when preceding a singleton rhotic. Qualitative analysis shows, furthermore, a more complex picture. Intervocalic geminate rhotics seem to allow a greater range of possibilities: they can be realized mainly as trills, but approximants, fricatives, taps, and combined realizations (trill or tap with a fricative appendix) are found too. However, a great within-speaker variation has also been observed.