Yes-no questions in Italian are not marked morpho-syntactically and intonation is the only cue distinguishing declarative vs interrogative modality. However, in different regional varieties of Italian, the intonation patterns of questions vary dramatically and yes-no questions can be realised with final rising or falling contours. We investigate whether adult learners of L2 Italian correctly identify the modality (interrogative vs declarative) of a sentence, when pronounced by native speakers of different regional provenance, using different rising and falling contours. We developed an identification test where participants were exposed to 100 stimuli (10 sentences x 5 varieties x 2 modalities), pronounced by 10 speakers from 5 different regions in Italy. 20 L1 English learners of L2 Italian and 20 L1 Italian control speakers listened to the final syllables of each utterance and identified it as declarative or interrogative. Results show that L1 Italian speakers correctly identify sentence modality at higher rates than learners, and that questions with final falling contours have the lowest correct identification rates for learners. We argue that this may be attributed to L1 transfer (since a rise is the default realisation for yes-no questions in English, even more so without syntactic inversion), as well as to universal patterns.