What motivates extra-rising patterns in L2 French: Acquisition factors or L1 Transfer ?

Fabian Santiago (1) , Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (2)

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
2 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

Learners of L2 French, be they German or Spanish, produce an extra-rising melodic movement (T*HH%) at the right edge of non-final IPs, whereas French native speakers do not produce such form. From the analyses of a large data set extracted from a learner corpus, it appears that this non-native tonal pattern could not be attributed to an L1 transfer. Different factors are thus explored in order to explain the occurrence of such form. The results show that: (i) the use of such rises is related to the learner level of proficiency, this form being unmarked at the beginning of the L2 acquisition process, and (ii) this tonal pattern could be a sign of linguistic insecurity.

Mots clés: Intonation; L2 acquisition; interlanguage prosody; phonetic implementation; duration; accent; rhythm; timing; prominence

Domaines: Linguistique

Fabian Santiago, Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie. What motivates extra-rising patterns in L2 French: Acquisition factors or L1 Transfer ?. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPHS), 2015, Glasgow, United Kingdom. ⟨halshs-01428442⟩