How pervasive is preaspiration? Investigating sonorant devoicing in Sienese Italian

We have recently found that voiceless geminates in Sienese Italian are frequently preaspirated, eg. /sette /> [sehte] 'seven'. Within the few (mostly Scandinavian) languages that are reported to have preaspirated voiceless stops, a phonetically similar process of sonorant devoicing before voiceless stops is often reported to occur, eg. Icelandic /vitt / [viht] ‘breadth ’ and /lampi / [lam 8pI] 'lamp ' (Hansson, 2001:157). Given that voiceless geminate stops are also frequently preaspirated in Sienese Italian, in this pilot study we investigate whether devoicing of sonorants might also occur, given the co-occurrence of the two phenomena in other preaspirating languages. Our preliminary investigation of /lt / sequences in spontaneous speech (6 speakers) shows that sonorant devoicing is very frequent, occurring in 85 % of all tokens analysed. We provide specific details of its frequency according to speaker, and context, as well as information about its acoustic characteristics