This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers written by well-known researchers in the field of Romance phonetics and phonology. An important goal of this book is to bridge the gap between traditional Romance linguistics -- with its long and rich tradition in data collection, cross-language comparison, and phonetic variation -- and laboratory phonology work. The book is organized around three main themes: segmental processes, prosody, and the acquisition of segments and prosody. The various articles provide new empirical data on production, perception, sound change, first and...

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system.
The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation...