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Copyright of Studi Medievali e Moderni (15930947) is the property of Paolo Loffredo Iniziative Editoriali Srl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Regional language varieties and dialects are experiencing a period of enormous diffusion and of affirmation of the individuality of human beings: they are a comfort zone used to talk about everyday life, about one's own intimacy, but also to build around oneself an identity fortress to be used in relationships with others. The close link between Roman dialect, territory and identity emerges in the two series Strappare lungo i bordi and Questo mondo non mi renderà cattivo, created by Zerocalcare. The contribution aims to analyze its language (above all, lexicon) and culture, to confirm how Roman dialect is a vehicle for representing identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Signos is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Bilingual adaptations remain a subject of ongoing debate, with varying results reported across cognitive domains. A possible way to disentangle the apparent inconsistency of results is to focus on the domain of language processing, which is what the bilingual experience boils down to. This study delves into the role of the bilingual experience on the processing of agreement mismatches. Given the underrepresentation of minority bilingual speakers of non-standard varieties, we advance a unique comparative perspective that includes monolinguals, standard language bilinguals, and different groups of minority language bilinguals, taking advantage of the rich linguistic diversity of the Italian peninsula. This comparative approach can reveal the impact of various sociolinguistic aspects of the bilingual experience across different bilingual trajectories. We developed an auditory acceptability judgement task in Italian, featuring Subject-Verb agreement mismatches. Participants evaluated the stimuli on a 5-point Likert scale and reaction times were recorded. The results do not reveal significant differences between the speakers of standard languages: Italian monolinguals and Italian-Spanish bilinguals. Instead, significant differences are found between monolinguals and the two groups of minority language bidialectals, as well as between the bidialectal groups themselves: Italian-Pavese bidialectals were faster than both Italian-Agrigentino bidialectals and Italian monolinguals, while Italian-Agrigentino bidialectals were less accurate than both Italian-Pavese bidialectals and Italian monolinguals. This intricate picture is explained through variables associated with second language use and language switching. Our findings suggest that if bilingualism is viewed as a yes/no phenotype, it is unavoidable that the bilingual experience will remain a mystery linked to intensely debated results. If, however, one accepts that bilingual adaptations are shaped by the environmental ecology of each trajectory, variation across bilingual processing outcomes is unsurprising. Overall, we argue that specific sociolinguistic factors behind each bilingual experience can reveal where bilingual adaptations on language and cognition stem from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Italica Belgradensia is the property of University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the microvariation in language spoken in Southern Lazio, Italy, particularly focusing on the morphosyntax of these varieties and their complex systems of complementation and auxiliary selection. It highlights the linguistic uniqueness of Southern Lazio, bridging the gap between central Italian and upper southern Italian varieties, and discusses the implications of this microvariation in the broader context of Romance languages.

Items of food lexicon, particularly relevant to fruit names, observed in the dialect spoken in Nemi, in the Castelli Romani area, are characterized by survival of the neutral gender. Materials, collected through dialectal inquiries, are analyzed from both etymological and morphological points of view and grouped according to their plural endings: -a, -ora, -i, and -e. A marked vitality is shown by the class of nouns with - a ending in the plural, such as u melu / e mela (eng. 'the apple, the apples'). This morpheme is also found in other sectors of the lexicon and in toponymy. An insight is also given regarding the sociolinguistic use of those forms, that reveals the variable vitality of the dialect among people of different age ranges. This specific type of morphological analysis applied to a specific set of lexical items confirms the picture of extraordinary variety of the Median dialects of Italy, which the dialect of Nemi including those of the Castelli Romani area, belongs to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vox Romanica: Annales Helvetici Explorandis Linguis Romanicis Destinati is the property of Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co.KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Italica Wratislaviensia is the property of Wydawnictwo Adam Marszalek and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Italica Wratislaviensia is the property of Wydawnictwo Adam Marszalek and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper analyses the geographical, lexical and semantic variation of three words belonging to the language of gastronomy: bocconotto, pasticciotto and fruttone. These three gastronymes are widespread (at least, the first two) mainly in the central-southern area where, in many of the variants, they can be considered geosynonyms (and, sometimes, geohomonyms). However, they develop a singular lexical and semantic evolution in Puglia, in the Salento micro-area, which is the privileged object of investigation of this study. The geolinguistic variation leads to a situation of pseudo-geosynonymy that in this work we will try to examine by following the diachronic evolution of the three words characterized by lexical, onomasiological and semasiological variants. The lexical investigation, while not excluding other aspects considered important for the purposes of the survey (that is popular legends, newspaper articles, blogs, specialized websites), concerns above all the attestations that can be taken from ancient culinary literature and from lexicographic repertoires. Furthermore, a clarification is required: when we speak about the language of gastronomy, the reconstruction of the origin and diffusion of the entries is always a difficult task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the issue of lexical stress perception in both a developmental (comparing children and adults with typical development) and a clinical perspective (comparing typically developing children and children with dyslexia). The three parameters characterizing the acoustic profiles of words and non-words in a certain language are duration, pitch and intensity of its syllables. Based on (sparse) previous literature on Italian and other European languages, it was expected that syllable duration would be the parameter predominantly determining the perception of stress position. It was furthermore anticipated that children with dyslexia may be found to have an altered perception of lexical stress, due to their impairments in auditory processing of either pitch, duration or (more controversial) intensity. Systematic manipulation of the pitch, duration and intensity profiles of three Italian trisyllabic non-words produced a series of 81 stimuli, that were judged with respect to stress position (perceived on the ultimate, penultimate, or antepenultimate syllable) by the three groups of participants. The results showed, contrarily to expectations, that the pitch component is the most reliable acoustic cue in stress perception for both adults, in whom this dominance is very strong, and typically developing children, who showed a similar but quantitatively less marked pattern. As to children with dyslexia, they did not seem to rely on any parameter for their judgments, and rather gave random responses, which point to a general inability to process the various acoustic modulations that normally contribute to stress perception. Performance on the stress perception task strongly correlates with language (morphosyntactic) measures in the whole sample of children, and with reading abilities in the group with dyslexia, confirming the strict relationship between the two sets of skills. These findings seem to support a language-specific approach, suggesting that the set of acoustic parameters required for the development of stress perception is language-dependent rather than universal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Thiasos Monografie is the property of Edizioni Quasar di Severino Tognon s.r.l. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper briefly discusses the problems and methods of language historiography thematizing Saussure's distinction between matière and objet. A number of representative nexuses are also commented on: the history of the phoneme, the supposed birth of scientific linguistics,the question of precursors, the relation between structuralism and phenomenology, the relation between language theories and research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Italica Wratislaviensia is the property of Wydawnictwo Adam Marszalek and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The phenomenon of “neodialettalità” is examined from to perspectives. Initially the term was used to describe works of Italian poets in vernacular languages. Such choice of language was a result of Italian poets’ protest in 1960s against gradual disappearance of vernacular languages and cultural traditions inherent to them. Currently the phenomenon of “neodialettalità” is a consequence of revolutionary sociocultural changes which took place over the last 30-40 years. Those changes did make Italian commonly used but at the cost of vernacular languages which for decades have been pushed to the margin and considered to be a symbol of backwardness or social degradation. It should come as no surprise then that those languages degenerated (or degraded, went through a crisis – author’s comment) and as a result cultural values inherent to them did too. Currently we can observe in Italian society a desire to partly resurrect those traditions though popularization of vernacular languages in many aspects of social life: in literature, advertising, graffiti, newspapers, websites etc. In this paper the author analyses novels of two authors from Apulia region whose works, both in terms of language and sociopragmatics, refer to the phenomenon of “neodialettalità”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diacronia is the property of Revista Diacronia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Neuroimaging studies of speech processing increasingly rely on artificial speech-like sounds whose perceptual status as speech or non-speech is assigned by simple subjective judgments; brain activation patterns are interpreted according to these status assignments. The naïve perceptual status of one such stimulus, spectrally-rotated speech (not consciously perceived as speech by naïve subjects), was evaluated in discrimination and forced identification experiments. Discrimination of variation in spectrally-rotated syllables in one group of naïve subjects was strongly related to the pattern of similarities in phonological identification of the same stimuli provided by a second, independent group of naïve subjects, suggesting either that (1) naïve rotated syllable perception involves phonetic-like processing, or (2) that perception is solely based on physical acoustic similarity, and similar sounds are provided with similar phonetic identities. Analysis of acoustic (Euclidean distances of center frequency values of formants) and phonetic similarities in the perception of the vowel portions of the rotated syllables revealed that discrimination was significantly and independently influenced by both acoustic and phonological information. We conclude that simple subjective assessments of artificial speech-like sounds can be misleading, as perception of such sounds may initially and unconsciously utilize speech-like, phonological processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a critical bibliography of sociolinguistics research in Italy.