Investigating interlanguages beyond categorical analyses: Prosodic marking of information status in Italian learners of German

Abstract

Previous studies report that Italian learners of German transfer their L1 prosody to their L2 when marking information status prosodically within noun phrases (NPs). However, these studies were based on a categorical analysis of accentuation based on the presence or absence of pitch accents, which might not provide the full picture of interlanguages, in which category boundaries are flexible and dynamically evolving. We elicited two-word NPs in two different information status conditions – given-new (GN) and new-given (NG) – in L1 German, L1 Italian, and L2 German. We performed a periodic-energy-informed analysis to explore speakers’ continuous modulation of F0 and prosodic strength and additionally discuss the results for the interlanguage in categorical terms. Learners prosodically mark information status by modulating the F0 contour on the first word similarly to their L1. However, learners reduce the prosodic strength of the second word in the noun phrase across the board, i.e. irrespective of information status. This pattern resembles German deaccentuation, and indicates that the learners are using a salient pattern but are not associating it with the appropriate pragmatic function. The current study revealed patterns for L1 Italian learners of L2 German which did not emerge in previous categorical analyses of the intonation of Italian learners of German.