ACQUISIZIONE DI FENOMENI TEMPORALI E RITMICI DELL’ITALIANO: ANALISI DI PRODUZIONI DI APPRENDENTI ANGLOFONI DI ITALIANO L2

Abstract

Despite the conspicuous number of studies on the acquisition of L2 segmental patterns, research on L2 prosody is scarce and mostly deals with L2 English. In this paper we characterise the rhythmic patterns of L1 English learners of L2 Italian. We analysed read speech of 24 learners and compared them with data of L1 Italian and L1 English and compute several rhythm metrics. The results partially support the hypothesis that learners produce intermediate rhythmic patterns between the L1 and the target language. However, non-normalized rhythm metrics illustrate a different pattern, whereby L1 English learners of Italian seem to overshoot some rhythm characteristics. Such results are explained on the basis of the interference of speech rate and point to the need to use normalized metrics for studying rhythmic patterns of L2 speech. Finally, we did not find significant effects of variables of L2 acquisition (years of study, length of stay in Italy, competence in other Romance languages) on values of rhythm metrics.

Keywords

• Italian
• rhythm
• prosody
• acquisition