Foreign accent and persuasiveness. Native and non native voices in a radio spot

The study deals with non-native Italian speakers’ persuasiveness from an experimental perspective. Through an acoustic- perceptive analysis carried out on radio speech of French, Russian, Chinese and Italian speakers, the study aims at identifying the acoustic perceptual correlates of persuasiveness, in order to verify whether a persuasive communication depends on the degree of foreign accent, or whether it is rather related to language-independent variables. Spectro- acoustic analysis and perceptive test outcome point out that foreign-accented Italian speakers seem to be limited in the achievement of a persuasive speech and that, by contrast, for both native and non-native speakers a less varied and more flattened tone favours persuasiveness.