Rhythm in narration and description in L2 Italian

The study compares narration and description in the semi-spontaneous speech of two native Italian speakers and two adult immigrants having different L1s—Swahili and Wolof—with different competence levels in L2 Italian (respectively A2 and B1 of the CEFR). Subjects were asked to perform three linguistic tasks, characterized by different rhythmic-prosodic features and having similar trends in L1 and L2: the description of a picture; a visually guided storytelling, requiring the production of a short narration elicited by a comic strip; and the narration of an emotionally involving personal experience. Results showed that in L2 Italian the description is defined by a lower speech rate and longer and more frequent silent pauses, maybe due to a greater difficulty encountered by the speakers in the discourse planning. These problems are, however, minimized in the narration, thanks to the temporal sequence of events, which is used as a guiding pattern for the structuring of the utterance. The personal and more involving narration was presented with a more fluent speech than in the other two tasks, and with a higher percentage of articulated sequences, especially for the learner having the lowest level of competence in L2 Italian. Generally speaking, a relationship between the degree of variability of the statement and the level of L2 proficiency was found: for the lowest level, sentences are more diversified in terms of rhythm and prosody, depending on the task typology.