Acquisizione di aspetti ritmici dell'Italiano: analisi di apprendenti anglofoni di italiano L2

In the present study, the spoken production of 24 English learners of Italian L2 was analysed and compared with the production of two control groups respectively composed by native Italian speakers and native English speakers. The aim of this thesis is to analyse and understand the processes of acquisition of rhythmic and temporal aspects by English learners of Italian L2 as well as to analyse some features of the spoken production related to pauses and sound chains. What we expected from the experiment was to see an intermediate position of English learners of Italian between the values of Italian native speakers and English native speakers. The results only partially confirmed our hypothesis but enabled interesting considerations on rhythm acquisition, the conditioning of variables and the way we used metrics to evaluate them. The experiment was in fact useful to understand which metrics are the most appropriate in order to highlight the processes of rhythm acquisition and the rhythmic patterns adopted by English learners of Italian L2. During the experiment, we also collected evidence of the importance and influence of speech rate for the analysis of rhythm acquisition, and we understood the importance of using normalized metrics, especially the PVI. Results suggest that the metrics that enable a clearer differentiation among the groups are %V and VnPVI, but also that metrics non-normalized for speech rate may present less significant results. Consonantal metrics show that the English learners who took part in the experiment still reproduce rhythmic patterns typical of their L1 in the L2 and that the consonantal variability is very high.