Aspiration in different languages

So, in my quest to pronounce Italian correctly, I stumbled across information that said plosives in Romance are unaspirated (in contrast to English) and hear any apiration as indication of a foreign accent. This leads to a bit of confusion.

For example "p" is a plosive (a stop). When I pronounce a word with a "p" in it, a burst of air accompanies it. This I define as aspiration. You can feel this if you put your hand up to your mouth as you pronounce.

Fine, but I asked my husband, a native speaker of Italian, to do the same with the Italian verb "rispondere" and then the noun "pancia". He confirmed twice that he felt a burst of air too.

Shouldn't he have not felt the burst of air? Have I confused what aspiration is (most likely)? Is his accent off (doubt this)?

I'd also like to know if anyone can really hear this (and thus interpret it as a foreign accent). What do the speakers of other languages say?

If these is audible to others, any suggestions to learn to eliminate this? I'm shooting for a native-like accent in Italian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_consonant

Hi Tiffany,

Generally speaking, p, t, and k are not aspirated in Romance languages, at least not in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian. Of course one would feel a little burst of air when putting the hand near the mouth, because their nature is precisely leaving the air out suddenly. But this burst is normally a feature one wouldn't hear in these languages, so a foreigner whose mother thongue is German, for instance, which exagerates even more this burst in the above consonants, tries to speak, say, Spanish and is not aware of the lack of plosiveness in Spanish, will immediatly sound strange to Spanish speaking people. Something foreigner will sound in his words, regardless if the rest of his pronountiation is good enough.

"Generally speaking, p, t, and k are not aspirated in Romance languages, at least not in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian."

I never really thought about this, but it is true. The most easily recognizable feature of an English accent in Spanish is the exaggeration of these consonants. Ex:
pato
teatro
cocina

A typical English speaker, who was not raised around Spanish his whole life, would exaggerate the consonants in all of these words.

I can't describe the proper way of pronouncing it in Spanish. It's almost like, you cut the sound short, so there is no aspiration. I'm trying to think of way to describe that with regard to your mouth and tounge.

Thanks guys. I'll work on it. My husband say I don't pronounce the consonants in a non-native way when speaking Italian and I do notice a difference in the force of the burst when speaking English (perfect) versus Italian (perfetto). It's less in Italian. Perhaps I learned the difference early on (since I started Spanish at six), and make it, even though I can't tell the difference in the sounds? No clue.

Well with me, I can feel the air 2 inches away from me when saying "Perfect", but not when saying "Perfecto".