Descrivere la competenza ritmica in lingua straniera: uno studio sull’italiano di apprendenti anglofoni

Despite the increased interest toward suprasegmental aspects in foreign/second language acquisition, a shared «acquisitional prosody» is still lacking, especially for rhythm, with studies often reporting controversial and inconsistent findings. The aim of the study is to observe the rhythmic competence in Italian as FL spoken by English-speaking learners with different levels of proficiency. A corpus of read speech, both in the native and non-native languages, was collected from 5 Italian native speakers and 12 English-speaking learners of Italian (from A1 to B2 level of CEFR). Recordings were spectroacoustically analysed and manually segmented into vocalic and consonantal intervals, allowing the calculation of different rhythmic metrics. Results highlight a varied contribution of metrics in describing the rhythm of interlanguage and differentiating learners’ speech on the basis of proficiency level. In this complex picture, vowel duration appears to play a key role, both when considered as a percentage of total utterance duration and in rate-normalized measures.