Relatore Chiar mo Prof. Graziano Serragiotto Correlatore

4.3. Spelling and Pronunciation 
English has a phonologically opaque 
orthography, since it “has one-to-many grapheme-
phoneme and phoneme-
grapheme correspondences”, on the other hand, Italian has a phonologically 
transparent orthography, since it has a near one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and 
phonemes (Cook and Bassetti, 2005). Therefore, because of the close relationship between spelling 
and pronunciation in Italian, Italians may tend to give Italian values to English graphemes. Regarding 
the main problems for Italians concerning the influence of spelling on pronunciation, Duguid claims: 
a)
“the letter r is always pronounced in Italian, and this is carried over into English, 
leading to mistakes in words like farmer; 
b)
double consonants are pronounced as such in Italian; this can affect learners' 
pronunciation of words such as summer, accurate, sitting, opposite; 
c)
the letters c and g vary as to their pronunciation in Italian according to what follows: 
c 
is pronounced /tʃ/ before i or e, but as /k/ before other vowels; g is pronounced/dʒ/ 
before i or e, but as /g/ elsewhere; sc 
is pronounced /ʃ/ before e or i, but as /sk/ 
elsewhere. Typical errors resulting from this are: 
‘achent’ for accent,‘sinjer’ for 
singer
, ‘sheen’ for scene. Italian ch is pronounced /k/, leading to occasional errors like 
‘kip’ for chip; 
d)
a w in loan words from English or other languages is often pronounced as /v/: vat for 
watt. Students tend to carry this over to all English words with a w; 
e)
learners sometimes pronounce initial silent letters, as in pneumonia and psychology, 
where such initial letters are pronounced in 
Italian” 
(Duguid, 2001: 76-77).