French is a language that poses particular difficulties for the second language (L2) learner in the processing of continuous speech. The phonological processes of liaison and enchainement (resyllabification), can render syllable and word boundaries ambiguous (e.g. un air ‘a melody’ and un nerf ‘a nerve’, both [oe˜ne˜]). Some research has suggested that speakers of French give listeners acoustic cues to word boundaries by varying the duration of liaison and initial consonants and that access to mental representations in the lexicon is facilitated by these cues (e.g. Spinelli, McQueen & Cutler, 2003); however no study to date has directly demonstrated that durational differences are exploited in the online segmentation of speech. One way to directly test the exploitation of duration as a parsing cue by both native and non-native speakers is to manipulate and exaggerate this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors constant. To this end, the current study employed ambiguous French phrases in which the pivotal consonants (i.e. the /n/ in un air/nerf) had been instrumentally shortened and lengthened while the rest of the phrase remained unaltered. Eighteen native speakers of French and 18 advanced late learners of L2 French were tested on an AX discrimination task and a forced-choice identification task employing these manipulated stimuli. The results suggest that duration alone can indeed modulate the lexical interpretation of sequences rendered ambiguous by liaison in spoken French. In addition, although a good deal of variance was observed in both participant groups, five out of 18 non-native participants scored at or above the native mean on both perceptual tasks. These results are particularly interesting in that they suggest that not only can advanced L2 learners develop native-like sensitivity to non-contrastive phonological variation in a L2, but that these learners can exploit this information in L2 speech processing.
2017. Pour un renouvellement de l'enseignement de la liaison en FLE au regard des corpus: défis d'apprentissage et usages contemporains. Journal of French Language Studies 27:1 ► pp. 87 ff.
Gustafson, Erin & Ann R. Bradlow
2016. French Speech Segmentation in Liaison Contexts by L1 and L2 Listeners. Laboratory Phonology 7:1
Schwartz, Geoffrey
2016. Word boundaries in L2 speech: Evidence from Polish learners of English. Second Language Research 32:3 ► pp. 397 ff.
Schwartz, Geoffrey, Arkadiusz Rojczyk & Anna Balas
2015. Monitoring English Sandhi Linking – A Study of Polish Listeners’ L2 Perception. Research in Language 13:1 ► pp. 61 ff.
Tremblay, Annie & Elsa Spinelli
2014. English Listeners’ Use of Distributional and Acoustic-Phonetic Cues to Liaison in French: Evidence from Eye Movements. Language and Speech 57:3 ► pp. 310 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.