Does gemination resist linguistic attrition? A study on Italian migrant speech in Melbourne Australia

In this study, we explore the possible effect of linguistic attrition on consonant gemination among speakers of Italian living in Australia. We analyse a corpus of spontaneous speech for a group of native Italian speakers who emigrated to Melbourne in Australia between the 1950s and 1970s. Given gemination is a fully lexicalised and stable phenomenon in Italian but not in English, we investigate whether, after many years of living in Australia, the phonological contrast between singleton and geminate consonants in Italian is preserved, or undergoes phonetic shift due to longterm contact with English. An analysis of acoustic durations reveals that all participants produced a significant difference in singleton and geminate consonant length, albeit with variable lengthening ratios. A post-hoc qualitative analysis seems to point to shorter geminate durations for speakers who have lived longer in Australia, but this will need to be supported by further research.