Perzeptive Aspekte der Prominenz in der Fremdsprache Deutsch

Over the last decades, suprasegmentals have become crucial also in the framework of German as a foreign language (GFL) teaching. Prosodic training is key to avoid the so-called foreign accent and the wrong interpretation of the communicative aims of utterances, and this is also true for Italian-speaking GFL-students, who have difficulty not only in pronouncing German correctly, but also in adequately perceiving and interpreting its prosodic regularities. Thus, it is important to investigate learners’ and native speakers’ perceptual habits in order to highlight similarities and differences between them. This paper presents the results of a perceptual experiment on speech samples taken from podcasts. The experimental investigation of prominence perception is conducted on a group of Italian students and a group of native German speakers. The results of the perceptual experiment are correlated with an acoustic analysis of the speech samples in order to identify the acoustic cues that steer prominence perception.