Impact of prosodic training on Italian as L2 by Hiberno-English speakers: the case of polar questions

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the efficacy of a perceptionproduction training on the production of Italian-L2 yes/no questions by Hiberno-English learners. Our hypotheses are that an intensive prosodic training improves the production of Italian-L2 prosody regarding both 1) the lexical stress patterns and 2) the intonation patterns, in terms of both their phonological composition and the phonetic details of their implementation. Though results are preliminary, the comparison of productions by trained and control subjects shows that, as hypothesized, only the former were able to change the prosodic features of yes/no questions in ItalianL2, improving as for both the lexical stress and the intonation patterns.