A brief summary

CompLeXSpeech (Sounding Complex. Morphological structure and lexical information in speech production, perception and comprehension, PRIN 2022, Prot. 20224RHTNL) is a 24-month research project funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.1. The project was conducted by three Research Units (henceforth, Rus) based at Università degli Studi di Milano (PI: Chiara Meluzzi), Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo (Associated Investigator: Chiara Celata), and Università degli Studi dell’Aquila (Associated Investigator: Luisa Corona). The total allocated budget was of €185,000.

The project investigated whether, and to what extent, the morphological structure and lexical-statistical properties of words are systematically encoded in the fine phonetic detail of speech. Specifically, it asked whether homophonological structures that differ in their grammatical function or lexical status are produced differently at the acoustic and articulatory level, and whether such differences could be relevant to spoken word comprehension. Italian was selected as the primary language of investigation because of its distinctive morphological typology, more fusional and less agglutinative than the Germanic languages on which most prior research has focused. Furthermore, Italian has a rich system of derivational morphology, providing an extensive testing ground for the hypothesis of a direct phonetics-grammar interface.

The project was originally designed to address four interrelated subgoals:

(1) the acoustic investigation of morphological complexity and transparency as gradient variables in the production of Italian derivationally complex words;

(2) the articulatory investigation of speech gesture coordination as a function of morphological and lexical properties;

(3) the perceptual investigation of listeners’ sensitivity to morphophonetically conditioned acoustic variation;

(4) the assessment of morphological awareness in speakers with varying levels of literacy and proficiency in Italian, with implications for language teaching and learning.

The project adopted an explicitly cross-disciplinary methodology, integrating acoustic phonetics, articulatory phonetics (Ultrasound Tongue Imaging), speech perception, quantitative corpus analysis, and metalinguistic experimental tasks. Three research grants (assegni di ricerca) were activated, one per RU, providing dedicated human resources for the empirical activities.