The importance of articulatory and phonetic training in the production of L2

40 3. THE EXPERIMENT 3.1 Aims and hypothesis The aims of this is study is to find out if an articulatory (ultrasound - US) training is better than a perceptual training and if a short training may help Italian learners in reproducing the English contrast /ɑ-ʌ/. These aims are based on the fact that Italian learners find extremely difficult to perceive and produce the contrast, since, according to the mother tongue phonetic- phonological system, Italian learners produce /ɑ/-L2 as /ɔ/-L1 and /ʌ/-L2, often, as /a/-L1 (S. D’Apolito, 2017). The English orthography represents a further difficulty. Indeed, in Italian language the orthography is relatively transparent and native Italians tend to follow the orthographic form and, as a consequence, to mispronounce English written words, which are phonologically opaque instead. However, despite the fact that both trainings may help learners to move from the most similar L1 sound toward a new vowel target position, the US articulatory training is expected to be more effective than the perceptual one since a direct feedback can help learners to understand how to position the tongue for the production of the L2 vowels, or at least to differentiate them adequately from L1 similar vowels. The US is also expected to allow subjects to better control tongue position reaching a more stable tongue position over time. 3.2 Method 3.2.1 Subjects Nine female subjects from Southern Apulia (Salento) participated in the experiment. All speakers are monolingual, who have never been in a foreign country for longer than a month. The subjects have started studying English