Non ti credo: i correlati acustici della credibilità in italiano L2

This study addresses the relationship between foreign accent and credibility. A hundred seventy-five native Italian listeners, after hearing a set of 10 news uttered in Italian by one native speaker of Italian and four non native speakers of L1 Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic and Japanese, were asked to assess the comprehensibility, i. e. listener’s estimation of difficulty in understanding an utterance, and the truthfulness of each news item. Results of perceptual tests were experimentally verified through spectro-acoustic analysis. There was no evidence of a correlation between degree of accent and credibility, while results revealed the relevance of comprehensibility factors such as disfluency, frequency of silences, pitch range variation, silent pauses, segmental errors.