This study aims to examine the production and perception of intonation markers, during the acquisition of a second language. In particular, the research investigates how Italian listeners make use of native and non-native prosodic cues for segmenting dialogues realized by Polish learners of Italian L2. The results have been compared with those obtained from the analysis of speech corpora produced by native Italian subjects. The study raises a series of problematic issues. Which auditory cues are essential for the perception of prosodic boundaries? Are such cues language-specific? Are positional effects salient enough for L2 learners? In Italian as L2, all fluency indexes are altered. The speech of non-natives speakers is non cohesive both on the articulatory and prosodic level. On the intonational level, the presence of a rising pattern is systematically present even when the tonal unit has a conclusive meaning. This behavior may be not interpreted as a mere transfer, but probably it assumes a specific pragmatic function. The joint evaluation of collected data allows us to make some assumptions about the hierarchy of phonetic factors in relation to the linguistic function of tonal units
Prosodic feature in native and non-native speech segmentation
SORIANELLO, Patrizia
2012-01-01
Abstract
This study aims to examine the production and perception of intonation markers, during the acquisition of a second language. In particular, the research investigates how Italian listeners make use of native and non-native prosodic cues for segmenting dialogues realized by Polish learners of Italian L2. The results have been compared with those obtained from the analysis of speech corpora produced by native Italian subjects. The study raises a series of problematic issues. Which auditory cues are essential for the perception of prosodic boundaries? Are such cues language-specific? Are positional effects salient enough for L2 learners? In Italian as L2, all fluency indexes are altered. The speech of non-natives speakers is non cohesive both on the articulatory and prosodic level. On the intonational level, the presence of a rising pattern is systematically present even when the tonal unit has a conclusive meaning. This behavior may be not interpreted as a mere transfer, but probably it assumes a specific pragmatic function. The joint evaluation of collected data allows us to make some assumptions about the hierarchy of phonetic factors in relation to the linguistic function of tonal unitsI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.