Evaluating prosodic cues in Italian

The use of a Telegram chatbot as a CALL tool for Italian L2 learners

Abstract

Comparing the pronunciation of learners of a foreign language (FL) with utterances of native speakers is receiving attention thanks to the increasing number of applications arising in the field of computer-assisted teaching (Cazade, 1999) and computer-assisted language learning (Levy, 1997). At the same time, language-learning studies on prosodic inter-speaker variation bring to light a rhythmic-intonational variability that should not be reduced to few acceptable patterns but be part of the learner’s linguistic background. It still seems open to debate how best to make explicit to the learner his degree of prosodic competence on the basis of acoustic features (f₀ , intensity, duration) and other correlates (syllables, lexical accent, speech rate, pauses). In this study we present a chatbot as a proactive learning support to improve the oral skills in Italian L2