Contrastive Analysis of the Italian and English Consonant Phoneme Systems

Abstract

This work aims to conduct a comparative investigation of the main differences between the Italian and the English sets of consonant phonemes with the intention of discovering and systematizing the most recurring cases of interference that the Italian phonological system might lead to when English is spoken as a foreign language. The first chapter is preliminary to the other two as it compares and contrasts the two consonant systems depending on their presence/absence, distributions and graphemic correspondences. The second chapter provides supporting evidence of what stated in the previous one as it assesses the pronunciation and phonological level of a pool of approximately 30 first-year Ca’ Foscari students. Finally, the last chapter provides a list of useful and effective suggestions, rules of the thumb and strategies which I adopted during a tutorial on phonological practice. It must be finally remembered that the three chapters run parallel and all deal only with those phonemes which might cause trouble to Italian students, namely those which feature different articulations such as /t/, /d/ and /r/; those which exist only in Italian (/ʎ/, /ɲ/ and /dz/) or English (/h, θ, ð, ŋ/ and /z/); and, finally, the approximants /j/ and /w/ as they might pose problems regardless of the fact they present the same articulation and more or less the same distributions.