Le consonanti affricate: strategie di acquisizione in italiano L2

The present study aimed to investigate the acquisition of Italian affricate consonants by Albanian, Nigerian and Spanish learners. A corpus of semi-guided oral conversations was analyzed acoustically through Praat. The results collected prove that the production of Italian affricates does not raise particular difficulties if the sounds are already present in the mother tongue of the learner. Otherwise, if affricates are only partially represented, or not at all, the learner puts in place different learning strategies in order to reach the phonological target of the L2, such as assimilation, fusion and category dissimilation. The findings were interpreted according to the theoretical principles postulated by the Speech Learning Model.