Prosodic accuracy and foreign accent in cultural migrants
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2018/09/0009/000342Keywords:
prosody, foreign accent, motivation, cultural migrants, L2 ItalianAbstract
The present study examines the relationship between language learning motivation and prosodic accuracy in L2 Italian speakers. Four Romanians and four Arabs were selected from among cultural migrants living in Italy. Each L1 group includes learners with moderate and high motivational indexes, further split into two inexperienced and two experienced speakers (indexed by length of residence). The non-native subjects’ prosodic accuracy was assessed across four declarative sentences in Italian through acoustic measurements and a perception test. The same sentences were produced by four native Italians acting as a control group. Preliminary results suggest a possible correlation among prosodic accuracy, motivation indexes, and length of residence (LOR) levels.
References
Bongaerts, T., Van Summeren, C., Planken, B., & Schils, E. 1997. Age and ultimate attainment in the pronunciation of a foreign language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(4), 447-465.
Flege, J.E. 1988. Factors affecting degree of perceived foreign accent in English sentences. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 84(1), 70-79.
Major, R.C. 2001. Foreign accent: The ontogeny and phylogeny of second language phonology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Moyer, A. 1999. Ultimate attainment in L2 phonology: The critical factors of age, motivation and instruction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21(1), 81-108.
Nolan, F. 2003. Intonational equivalence: An experimental evaluation of pitch scales. In M.J. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003), 771-774. Barcelona: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
