Pitch Range Variations in L2 Italian Learners’ and Native Speakers’ Apologies

This study aims to explore the relationship between pitch variations and expression of apologies made by native and non-native speakers of Italian. 10 learners of Italian as L2 from Spain and 10 female native speakers of Italian from Calabria were engaged in four role-play activities. Each roleplay was supposed to trigger an apology, but the context and social distance between the interlocutors were variable. An acoustic analysis of participants apologies was carried out, considering fundamental frequency (f0) and pitch range variations. The results showed that the native speakers of Italian varied their pitch depending on the situation and the social distance between the interlocutors. By contrast, the L2 learners did not vary their pitch depending on context. Furthermore, in formal situations their pitch range was less wide than the native speakers . We thus can infer that the L2 learners, unlike the native speakers, might not yet have gained the ability to modulate the L2 prosody to vary the intensity of their apologies in accordance with contextual variables.