Do morphosyntactic boundaries trigger glottalization? A production study on Italian

In Italian, vowel length is considered allophonic, yet certain words suggest a phonological distinction where duration may play a role. Previous studies have shown articulatory and acoustic differences between hiatuses and allophonically long vowels, though glottalization remains underexplored. This study investigates the role of duration, intensity, f0, and glottalization in distinguishing long vowels and hiatuses, considering morphological and morphosyntactic boundaries. A corpus of 100 target words across five conditions was recorded by 30 Italian speakers, yielding 3000 utterances. Preliminary analyses indicate variation in f0, duration, and intensity across conditions, with hyphenated words exhibiting increased glottalization, particularly at lexical boundaries.