Differences in prominence perception by German natives and Italian L2 learners.

Acoustic aspects and their implications for SLA

Abstract

This study employs a perceptual and an acoustic analysis of a corpus of spontaneous utterances taken from German podcasts on sustainability. The objective is to identify and examine the differences in the perception of prominence between two groups of participants: a group of adult Italian learners of German as a Foreign Language (GFL) and a group of German native speakers. The results of the analysis lend support to the hypothesis that the differences in prominence perception can be attributed to perception patterns based on duration for Italian native speakers and on pitch variations for German native speakers. In light of the evidence presented, some considerations are made regarding the potential applications of acoustic analysis in GFL courses. The potential applications of this approach are investigated, based on a simplified visualisation of prosody, by means of F0 curves enriched with information on the periodic energy of the acoustic signal.