How to practice and perfect Italian nasal and lateral sounds

To practice and perfect Italian nasal and lateral sounds, a focused approach on specific phonetic exercises and awareness of articulation is important.

For nasal sounds in Italian (such as ñ, m, and ŋ), practice involves:

• Listening carefully to native speakers to recognize nasal quality.
• Repeating words and syllables containing nasal consonants like mannò, gnocchi, and pomodoro to train nasal resonance.
• Using biofeedback tools (like acoustic or visual feedback) to monitor nasalization can help improve control over nasal sounds.

For lateral sounds, especially the voiced palatal lateral ʎ as in Italian words like figlio or coglierò, techniques include:

• Imitating native speakers and practicing minimal pairs contrasting laterals from other similar sounds.
• Breaking down complex sounds into simpler components for articulation practice (for example, combining l and a palatal glide).
• Repeated articulation drills that focus on the tongue’s lateral contact with the roof of the mouth.

Pronunciation improvement also benefits greatly from targeted phonetic training that includes focused listening, repetition, auditory discrimination, and possibly using technology-assisted feedback mechanisms.

This method aligns with linguistic studies that show Italian nasal and lateral sounds may be challenging for second-language learners but can be acquired through systematic practice focused on native-like articulation and acoustic characteristics. ^{1, 2}

References

• production of L2 Italian voiced palatal lateral and voiced palatal nasal by English-speaking learners

• Effects of Biofeedback on Control and Generalization of Nasalization in Typical Speakers.

• Management of nasal vestibule carcinomas: recommendations by the Oncological Committee of the Italian Society of Otorhinolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery

• A STUDY ON THE PERCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES OF ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS ON AFFRICATE AND NASAL SOUNDS AT A UNIVERSITY IN THE MEKONG DELTA, VIETNAM

• Acoustic Study on the Pronunciation of Vowel Sounds in Spanish, Italian, and French Languages by Mongolian Learner

• Sobrerol in Managing Acute Respiratory Infections in Clinical Practice During the “Cold” Season: An Italian Primary Care Experience

• Oral corticosteroid prescribing practice for chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps among otorhinolaryngologists in Scotland: a nationwide survey

• Chronic Rhinosinusitis with Nasal Polyps: A Survey on Routine Management and Evaluation of Disease Control in Practice

• Clinical-Cytological-Grading and phenotyping in patients with chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps: the relevance in clinical practice.

• Inter-societal Delphi Consensus on the topical nasal treatments in Italy

• Internal and external nasal dilatator in patients who snore: a comparison in clinical practice

• Consonant gemination in Italian: the nasal and liquid case

• The Nasal Sonat

• Different distributions of contrastive vowel nasalization in Basque

• The sociophonetics of rhotic variation in Sicilian dialects and Sicilian Italian: corpus, methodology and first results

• Cross-Regional Patterns of Obstruent Voicing and Gemination: The Case of Roman and Veneto Italian

• Immediate Effects of Nasalance Exercises on Patients with Organic Dysphonia

• Speaker-independent Speech Inversion for Estimation of Nasalance

• Using naïve listener imitations of native speaker productions to investigate mechanisms of listener-based sound change

• Nasal consonants, sonority and syllable phonotactics: the dual nasal hypothesis

• Phonetic and phonological imitation of intonation in two varieties of Italian

• Processing Nasals with and without Consecutive Context Phonemes: Evidence from Explicit Categorization and the N100

• Acoustic changes in voice after surgery for snoring: preliminary results.

• After Self-Imitation Prosodic Training L2 Learners Converge Prosodically to the Native Speakers

• Remote sociophonetic data collection: Vowels and nasalization over video conferencing appsa)

• Language Proficiency and F0 Entrainment: A Study of L2 English Imitation in Italian, French, and Slovak Speakers