Production of palatalised consonants and jod clusters in Italian speakers of L2 Russian: an experimental study

The present paper seeks to analyse the production of specific sounds in speakers of Russian as a second language through an experimental procedure that involves the elicitation of words containing the target sounds. The sounds under analysis are palatalised consonants and clusters with /j/ present in words such as семья, and orthographically marked through the use of the мягкий знак (ь). The former sequences that will be marked as CjV, are formed by a palatalised consonant followed by a vowel, while the latter, labeled as CjjV are formed by a palatalised consonant, followed by a glide /j/ and a vowel. CjjV sequences, being clusters, present an ulterior articulatory movement (the approximant /j/) which has to be separated from the palatalisation of the previous consonant and that may, in some cases, be realised almost as a fricative. Furthermore, CjjV syllables appear to be difficult to perceive by L2 speakers (Geromel, 2021) and present some degree of difficulty in bilingual children as well (Duryagin et al., 2026), thus leading to the consideration that this phonological trait may be difficult per se, and not only for those that are studying Russian as a second language. The previous statements, along with the theoretical frameworks of SLM/r-SLM (Flege, 1995; Flege & Bohn, 2021) and PAM/PAM-L2 (Best, 1995; Best & Tyler, 2007) have led to the hypothesis of a high level of difficulty in differentiating CjjV and CjV in production for L2 speakers that may have mapped such sequences onto the same phonological category. Therefore, the data gathered from the elicitation task will be compared to L1 production (a control group) of the same sound sequences. This provides an overview on how and when native speakers actually differentiate the contrast under investigation, as well as indicating possible circumstances in which the contrast is not realised in L1 production (e.g unstressed syllables). The two groups of participants will be compared through an acoustic analysis using Praat (Boersma et al., 2026) to identify the presence or absence of jod as a distinctive feature in the contrast between CjjV and CjV. The present study will then concentrate on possible research approaches to combine experimental phonetics with didactical practice and research in order to provide a clearer picture on L2 acquisition of the contrast analysed in the present research.