The present study focuses on how Italian learners of French as L2 coarticulate French heterosyllabic sibilant sequences and how speech rate influences the production of these non-native sequences. As in Italian consonant sequences are less frequent than in French and very rarely appear across word boundary, the hypothesis is that a different degree of coarticulation is found in clusters produced by French, as reported in the literature, and by Italian learners of French. First results appear to confirm our expectations. A small degree of coarticulation characterises clusters produced by Italian, especially in comparison to what has been observed for French natives even if at a fast speech rate some cases of place assimilation are observed.
Index Terms. place assimilation, speech rate, L2.