L'accento tonale del giapponese percepito da discenti italofoni: un'indagine fonetico-percettiva

The aim of this paper is to examine how Italian learners of Japanese perceive lexical pitch accent under different experimental conditions. I will start by describing the articulatory and acoustic features of Japanese pitch accent, making a comparison with Italian stress accent. Japanese prosodic system will be also analysed from a typological point of view. After describing the accentual patterns of standard Japanese, I will present the results of a longitudinal perceptual experiment conducted with 48 Italian-speaking learners of Japanese. In this experiment I examined (1) the difficulty in perception of accent for the four accentual patterns, (2) the difficulty in perception of accent of words with unvoiced vowels, long vowels, moraic nasals and long consonants, (3) the difference in perception of accent of meaningless and meaningful words, (4) the relation between the perception of accent and the informant's proficiency level.