haga click aquí - Amprae

Italian Index: rhythmical-prosodic analysis of Italian L2
spoken by Albanian, Polish and Romanian speakers
Romito, Luciano; Tarasi, Andrea; Lio, Rosita
Laboratorio di Fonetica, Università della Calabria; Università di Salerno
Today, south Italy represents the area of first entry for many migrants who
move to the North afterwards. The acquisition of phonetic and phonological
(suprasegmental) features of a foreign language (L2) is a notable difficulty for
any speaker, indeed, often who shows a well linguistic proficiency in several
levels, like syntactic or lexical levels, can be anyway identifies as a foreign
talker, since his speech contains information which belong to a phonological
and prosodic system different compared to the level of the mother tongue (L1).
For this reason prosodic competence is, in many cases, more decisive then the
syntactic and lexical, as it allows the identification of the phonological system
and linguistic competence of a speaker then to a specific language.
Furthermore, the prosody depends on the correct interpretation of the meaning
and function of the utterance. Just this feature is one of the main problems with
speech recognition system.
The automatic Speech Recognition systems such as telephone directories in a
car, are normally developed for the first language. Then, the listener is able to
understand if some features can be considered as factors of variability within
the execution of a native speaker (considering the Italian diatopically variability)
or if they indicate the foreign origin of the speaker. This highlights the
importance of suprasegmentals information in verbal communication that
accompany the message.
There are also systems for Speaker Recognition, for example, LADO Language
Analysis and contra-expertise in the Dutch asylum procedure (Maaike Verrips,
IJSLL 2010:279-294), LOID Linguistic Origin Identification (Border Police -
Svezia) which are used indiscriminately on comparisons between Italian L1/L2
and through acoustic analysis they can verify the actual L1 of a speaker.
Materials and methods
In this research, the Corpus will be used is Pangea (Cfr. Romito & Talarico
2010).
Pangea is a corpus linguistic codes containing L1 and L2 Italian. The languages
considered for the construction of the corpus are currently: Chinese, Romanian,
Polish, Albanian and Arbëreshe. These languages where considered taking in
to account the new migration on ISTAT data. This corpus consists of twenty
five speakers of different sex, school grade and age. They live in Calabria at
least two years. Speakers have read a list of sentences in Italian (L2) and their
L1 and have produced at least three minutes of spontaneous speech in Italian
and in their L1. In addition, we created a reference sample consisting of Italian
speakers where born and living in Calabria. The analysis will be performed on
spontaneous speech.
The recording were made in the silent room Amplifon 2*2 of the Laboratory of
Phonetics of University of Calabria.
o The characteristics studied are Articulation Rate (VDA) which is
considered as a specific language parameter (Cfr. Caldognetto & Vagges 1991,
97