Le affricate italiane: percorsi di acquisizione

The acquisition of affricate consonants in Italian, particularly dental ones, constitutes an acquisitional hurdle by virtue of the markedness of this phonological category on a universal level; the difficulties also occur in a guided learning context, especially if the learners’ mother tongues are lacking in this articulatory modality. This work proposes to: 1) observe how the learning of a marked phonological category, such as that of affricates in Italian L2, proceeds in the IL of the learners, speakers of a L1 which lacks such a category; 2) investigate if the presence of allophones in the L1 which correspond to two affricate phonemes in the L2 can condition the learning of these categories; 3) describe the process of acquisition and the strategies adopted by the learners along their longitudinal path to deduce indications applicable to the teaching of the phonology of Italian L2. For this purpose, data from the oral production of two students of Italian L2 , whose mother tongue languages are lacking in the affricate category, have been analysed; one is a Brazilian Lusophone, the other a Francophone. The learning of Italian affricates has had a different outcome in the two subjects examined. On the whole the Brazilian learner showed greater difficulty than the French learner as the acquisition of the affricate category seems to have been influenced negatively by the presence of alveopalatal affricate allophones in the learner’s L1.