Analysis of Difficulties in Italian Phonetic Acquisition for Chinese Native Speakers from the Perspective of Third Language Acquisition

Research into foreign language acquisition has demonstrated that an individual’s mother tongue can significantly influence the phonetic acquisition of a second language. If learners have command of their mother tongue and a second foreign language, the linguistic competencies of both languages can affect the acquisition of a third language. This paper summarizes the common pronunciation errors of Italian beginners in higher education in China, identifying that their pronunciation is affected not only by the transfer of English, the second language, but also by the first language Chinese. The paper recommends that in pronunciation teaching, emphasis should be placed on guiding students to pay more attention to the articulatory positions, to consult the pronunciation annotations in dictionaries, and to integrate a multi-tiered feedback mechanism to enhance students’ phonetic discrimination capacity.