Prosodic marking of information status in L1 and L2. A comparative study of Dutch and French

TitleProsodic marking of information status in L1 and L2. A comparative study of Dutch and French
Publication TypePresentation
Year of Publication2007
Conference NameSummer Meeting on Prosody
AuthorsRasier, Laurent
PublisherNederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen
Conference LocationNijmegen, The Netherlands
Abstract

In recent years quite a lot of attention has been paid to the suprasegmental features of speech, i.e. stress, accent, intonation, tone, rhythm, and speech pauses (Fox 2000). By contrast, the study of prosodic systems suffers from a considerable under-representation in the field of second language acquisition research. Indeed, most work devoted to L2 pronunciation has hitherto focussed on segmental issues (Chun 2002, Leather & James 1991, Rasier 2006).

In the first part of this talk, I discuss some recent research on interlanguage prosody. Then, I will set out to investigate L1/L2 speakers’ use of prosody to signal information status in Dutch and French. The data consist in the L1 speech of 20 native speakers of Dutch and 20 native speakers of French on the one hand and in the L2 speech of 20 advanced French-speaking learners of Dutch and 20 advanced Dutch-speaking learners of French on the other (Rasier 2006). The corpus was gathered by means of an experimental accentuation test consisting in a picture description game in which the information value of target words was kept under control (see also Barlow 1998, Swerts et.al. 2002. The results show a strong trans­fer effect in the L2 learners’ use of prosody (accentuation, deaccentuation) in order to indicate information status. It is shown that the differences between the native and non-native speakers of Dutch and French regarding the prosodic marking of information status can be explained in terms of the markedness relations (in the sense of Eckmann 1988) between Dutch and French.