Native language influences in focus intonation: analysis of tonal alignment in Italian and German productions of Italian speakers of Lecce (South Italy)

Productions in a foreign language (L2) are commonly affected by segmental and suprasegmental features of the phonetic/phonological system of the mother tongue (L1). As for the segmental level, the sounds of the L2, which are close or similar to others of the L1, are deeply influenced by the native system; these influences are perceived as foreign accent but could also be acceptable from the point of view of speech intelligibility and not necessarily lead to a reduction of comprehension (Munro and Derwing, 1995). The same may not be true for segmental sounds of the L2 which are not similar to sounds of the L1 and it is definitely not true for suprasegmental features, which could instead affect pragmatic meaning of the sentence and lead to misunderstandings: Anderson-Hsieh et al. (1992) showed that among segmental level, syllable structure and prosody, the latter has the strongest influence on the intelligibility of productions. The influence of the native prosodic system on the production of L2 intonation has not been studied extensively and needs more research on speakers with different native languages, who learn different foreign languages; indeed, a great part of these studies investigates English as a foreign language produced by speakers with different language background. This problem is reported by Mennen (2007), who compares the results of different works on the acquisition of L2 prosody and identifies two groups of errors caused by L1 influence: phonological errors (use of a category instead of another one; for instance, a rise instead of a fall) and phonetic errors (different implementation of the same phonological category; for instance, a different slope for a rising accent). A frequent source of errors in the production of L2 prosody is tonal alignment, which refers to the timing relation between tonal targets (high (H) and low (L)) and segmental string. An example of phonetic error in foreign language productions due to differences in tonal alignment is pointed out by Mennen (2004), investigating the prosody of Greek as L2 produced by Dutch speakers: both Greek and Dutch share a prenuclear rise which is aligned later in Greek than in Dutch; the author found that four out of five Dutch speakers with high competence level of Greek transfer the phonetic properties of this tonal category from their native language to the production of the L2, implementing an earlier alignment of the F0 peak. Many studies on alignment of rising accents of …