Consonant gemination in first and second language acquisition

Consonant gemination is a relatively infrequent feature in world phonologies, and an area of evident uncertainty in he pronunciation of language learners. The presence of geminate consonants is correlated with several other rhythmic and prosodic characteristics of the language. It is therefore particularly important to understand the complex mechanism by which gemination progressively makes room for itself in the development of the speakers' phonological competence. This volume collects six contributions that deal with how children and adults acquire geminate consonants of Italian, Wolof, Finnish, Japanese and Hebrew. The adults are L2 learners with varied linguistic backgrounds, including English, German, Chinese and some Nigerian languages such as Edo or Igbo. This book coalesces a relatively large number of L1s and L2s, thus opening perspectives of truly comparative research in the study of geminate acquisition. The volume is of interest to phonologists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, scholars working in the field of pronunciation teaching, speech pathologists, as well as to technological and forensic applications of speech research