Comunicare in una lingua seconda. Il ruolo dell'intonazione nella percezione dell’interlingua di apprendenti cinesi di italiano

Suprasegmental features of language have recently been accepted among the main topics of language acquisition studies and language teaching theories with particular attention to the relationship between L1 and L2 prosodic competence.
Our study intends to evaluate the role played by suprasegmental levels of language analysis in the achievement of an L2 effective communication and, more specifically, identify which rhythmic-prosodic parameters are more relevant for a successful communication in a foreign language. We intend to check if some speech acts are prosodically difficult to be produced by non native speakers, and find out if there is a relationship between the perceived degree of foreign accent and the communication effec-tiveness.
The corpus used is an Italian two-voice dialogue recited by 16 speakers (8 dyads with same L1): 4 Italian native speakers with different geographical origins, and 12 Chinese speakers. The whole corpus consists of 16 recorded dialogues containing the following speech acts: statement, promise, question, order, granting, threat. The perceptive test, thus prepared, was administered to 50 native Italian speakers, all trainee teachers of L2 Italian. Each listener was asked to evaluate the communication effectiveness of each heard utter-ance on a 3-point-scale, to indicate which parameters were perceptively most relevant to the formulation of his/her assessment and to rate the degree of perceived foreign accent.
The results of the experiment show that the factors that play a key role in evaluating the communication effectiveness, both in L1 and L2, are, in a decreasing order: pitch contour, articulatory quality, articulation rate, silences; there is an inverse relationship between foreign accent and communication effectiveness; all studied speech acts are equally difficult to be realized by non native speakers.
The results of this first experiment were verified and confirmed through a second perceptual-acoustic experiment based on synthesised speech obtained using pitch transplantation technique.