The Acquisition of Italian Lexical Stress by Czech Learners

(In English) This thesis analyzes the acquisition of Italian lexical stress by university students whose native language is Czech, comparing proficiency levels B1 and B2-C1. Starting from the typological contrast between the mobile stress system of Italian and the fixed stress system of Czech, the research aims to identify the main difficulties and strategies adopted by learners in positioning the stressed syllable. The study, of a quantitative nature, is based on the analysis of errors emerging from written stress-marking tasks (on homographs and in a narrative text) submitted to 30 students. The data were classified according to phonological, grammatical, and morphological criteria to map critical areas and verify the influence of factors such as word complexity and proficiency level. The results provide a brief overview of the acquisition process and discuss the emerging phenomena observed in the production and recognition of Italian stress by Czech students. Keywords: Italian lexical stress, linguistic acquisition, Italian prosody, Italian LS, Czech-Italian transfer, stress errors.