Prosody in L2: the perceptive judgments of native Italians on the productions by Swedish learners : Diatopic phenomena in the natives’ perception

In the L2 learning process, prosody is among the most determinant linguistic features for a fully pragmatic competence. Additionally, this ability is often crucial for the disambiguation of certain structures and thus also crucial for perceptive acceptability. Italian prosodic configurations dramatically vary through the diatopic dimension. Nevertheless, certain prosodic structures and patterns can still be perceived as effective and acceptable. With these perspectives, we explored the oral acceptability in L2 of advanced Swedish learners of Italian through perceptive judgments by natives. Despite the lack of acoustic analysis and the limitation in the size of the sample of our study, the results showed a strong indication for a regional variation of the perception by the Italian natives, not only considering the production of learners but also considering the natives themselves. Finally, we discuss some of the didactic implications which may be considered particularly useful for native teachers in L2 contexts