Soziophonetisches Projekt Salzburg-Triest (SoPhoProST). Untersuchungen zur L1- und L2-Phonetik und Phonologie junger italienischer Deutschlerner

This paper presents SoPhoProST, an interdisciplinary project carried out by the Universities of Salzburg and Trieste (Heinz / Gärtig / Rocco) set up to explore the impact of the regional phonetic traits of native Italian speakers on German as L2, as well as their effect on language perception. The objectives of the project are 1) to identify and analyse the phonetic properties (segmental, phonotactic and prosodic) characterizing certain regional varieties of Standard Italian, 2) to measure their impact on the pronunciation of German by the respective native speakers, and 3) to measure their effect on the perception of and the attitudes towards phonetic features of German as a foreign language (e.g. features perceived or identified as «typical Italian pronunciation» or «distinctively regional/northern/southern/Venetian/Florentine», the impact of pronunciation on judgements of L2-proficiency in German, etc.). In order to answer the research questions, 24 Italian students of German as L2 were recorded both in Italian and in German. After the presentation of the project as a whole, the article reports the initial findings of a pilot study on the identification of (regional) accents in the L2-German recordings by German and Italian speaking subjects, and concludes with some considerations regarding the possible didactic applications of the data.