Learning Italian Phonetics: Dental Affricates’ Production by Irish English Speakers

Abstract

This work investigates the production of Italian dental affricates /ts dz/ by Irish English learners at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Dental affricates are sounds that are difficult for non-native speakers to acquire, and they vary greatly across Italian dialects. Previous works on the topic have demonstrated that learners tend to reduce affricates to fricatives, and that the voiced /dz/ is often substituted with the voiceless in every context. This survey investigates the production of 7 speakers divided into A2 and B1 levels.Participants were asked to compile a background questionnaire and to read a list of 47 sentences containing 52 dental affricates in different phonological contexts. Phonetic annotation was manually conducted on PRAAT, and the analysis focused on durational cues and realization of voicing. The results showed that voiced affricates were rarely produced and were often substituted with their voiceless counterpart, thus leading to the general non-acquisition of voicing for this class of phoneme. Furthermore, the length of the occlusive segment was shorter than the fricative one, particularly in the post-sonorant context; a gap between the occlusive and fricative portion has also been detected. No substantial differences between the A2 and B1 levels emerged.