Acoustic correlates of French accentuation in advanced Spanish learners of French

Schwab, Sandra

The present research aims at examining whether native Spanish speakers transfer some accentual properties from Spanish to French L2. Given that the main accentual difference between French and Spanish lies in the stress domain (supra-lexical vs lexical; e.g. Quilis, 1993; Lacheret & Beaugendre, 1999), we studied the production of nouns in a stressed position within the accentual phrase and adjectives produced in an unstressed position. Then, as the syllabic structure might indicate the position of stress in Spanish (e.g. amo /'amo/ vs amar /a'mar/), we studied the realization of stimuli ending with open and closed syllables. Eight native speakers of French and 8 Spanish advanced learners of French produced French sentences in which pseudowords played the role of a noun in a stressed position (e.g. un certain poutila || piquait tous les touristes) or the role of an adjective in an unstressed position (e.g. un poutila pic || était très utile). Each CV.CV.CV pseudoword (e.g. poutila) was presented in its CV.CV.CVC counterpart (e.g. poutilar). For each vowel of each sentence, we extracted the duration (in ms), the mean value of F0 (in Hz) and the maximum value of amplitude (in dB). For each parameter, we normalized the data, within each sentence, with z-scores. Data were analyzed with mixed-effects models (Baayen et al., 2008) in order to examine the effect of context (noun/adjective) and syllabic structure on the realization of the pseudoword in native and non-native speakers. Results showed that Spanish speakers tend to produce the last vowel of the pseudoword in a stronger way than native speakers, irrespective of the context (noun/adjective). This seems to suggest that they have not yet acquired the knowledge that stress is realized at the accentual phrase level rather than at the word level as in Spanish.

Acoustic correlates of French accentuation in advanced Spanish learners of French

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