Italian natives’ judgments of French learners’ Italian-L2 speech
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0015/000488Keywords:
L2-speech dimensions, perception, geminates, context and co-textAbstract
The present study focuses on perception to observe how Italian listeners judge the singleton/geminate contrast produced by French learners in terms of intelligibility, interpretability, comprehensibility and learners’ effort when producing native/non-native sounds. The important factors are the proficiency level (beginner vs advanced learners), the context, that is the production tasks (target word in isolation and within a phrase) in which also the amount of information available varies (co-text). Results show that advanced learners are more intelligible than the beginners who are perceived to produce the geminates with a lower accuracy and a greater effort. The co-text has a greater impact than the context as, in case of a low pronunciation accuracy, the richness of information helps listeners to understand learners’ intention.
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