Across languages of the world the /r/ sound is known for its variability. This variability has been investigated using articulatory models as well as in sociolinguistic studies. The current study investigates to what extent /r/ is a marker of a bilingual’s dominant language. To this end, a reading task was carried out by bilingual speakers from South Tyrol, who produce /r/ differently according to whether they dominantly speak Tyrolean or Italian. The recorded reading data were subsequently used in a perception experiment to investigate whether South Tyrolean bilingual listeners are able to identify the dominant language of the speaker. Results indicate that listeners use /r/ as a cue to determine the dominant language of the speaker whilst relying on articulatory distinctions between the variants. It is furthermore shown that /r/ correlates with three interdependent variables: the sociolinguistic background of the speakers, their speech production, and how their speech is perceived.

Objectives: The present work aims to contribute to the debate on the relationship between discrimination and production abilities in older pre-school-aged children and to fill a gap in the literature by providing evidence about this relationship in typically developing children speaking Italian, a language that is under-investigated. Methods: Two novel tests, an AX ‘same/different’ phonological discrimination test and a phonetic test, were administered to a sample of Italian pre-school children aged 72–78 months. Discrimination was tested at the feature and the syllable levels. Production was analyzed for consonant repertoire and the presence of phonological processes, such as devoicing or consonant cluster reduction. Results: In the AX test, significantly worse performance was found for syllables than for individual features. However, in production, no significant difference was found among phonological processes. No significant correlations were found between children’s performance in the two tests. Conclusion: The current data suggest that children’s discrimination and production abilities for speech are still developing after age 6. There is no complete overlap between what children produce and what they discriminate. The implications of these findings for theories of language development are discussed.

In this paper, we present a further step in the development of an emotion tracking system based on phonetic syllables and machine learning algorithms. A system built on phonetically defined units has advantages both on the side of the amount of data needed to train the classifier and on the ability of improving our knowledge about how humans use speech to recognize emotions on the base of the physical meaning of each used feature. Since the features extraction frequency is intrinsically variable, however, it is necessary to study how to represent context and dynamics as well as to evaluate the effects of their introduction in the system. The goal of this study is to evaluate the effects of context in a previously presented system working on isolated syllables only. Obtained results show that the system performance is improved.