Das klingt sympathisch! Selbst- und Fremdbild in der Sprechwirkung des italienischen Akzents

The fact that Italians and their accent are often perceived as "likeable", cheerful, friendly and warm-hearted is an old cliché that is still widespread today. In this paper, the effect of phonetic interference with regard to likability, comprehensibility and competence on different listener profiles is investigated, in particular whether and to what extent the results of the Italian L1 listeners, who hear their own accent, differ from the other two groups of listeners (German and Polish L1 test subjects). The overall result of the data evaluation allows three statements to be made: 1. According to German and Polish listeners, the likability score suffers least from foreign language interference in pronunciation. A slight Italian accent (in this case: in reading a German text) is regarded as likeable and this seems to be fairly independent from the other two criteria (comprehensibility and allocation of competence). 2. Italians perceive their own accent clearly when there is interference at a segmental level, and less when there is prosodic interference. 3. For the Italians, as well as for the Poles, the comprehensibility correlates more with errors on the segmental level. This is in contrast to the results of the German group. Here, comprehensibility is most affected by prosodic interference.