The development of the Italian vowel system in the interlanguage of Chinese adult speakers

Abstract

The present study is a preliminary investigation on the ability of standard Chinese speakers to pronounce accurate vowel segments in L2 Italian. To this pourpose, six native Chinese learners of Italian, with different levels of L2 competence, were considered and the spectroacoustic analysis of Chinese and Italian vowel inventory, extracted from a corpus of read speech, was performed. Results have shown that the study participants, regardless of the L2 competence level, fail to differentiate the stressed and unstressed vowels, and to distinguish mid-open from mid-closed (front and back) vowel phonemes in Italian. Furthermore, it seems that only phoneme and not allophones are transfered in Italian from the Chinese L1.