The Acquisition of Question Intonation by Mexican Spanish Learners of French

Théorie, recherche et didactique de la prosodie et de l’intonation en L2 : nouvelles perspectives

“…Les études examinant l'acquisition du phrasé prosodique et ses rapports avec la structure accentuelle ne sont pas, malheureusement, très nombreuses en français L2. Quelques études récentes ont montré qu'en règle générale, les étudiants hispanophones arrivent à produire les accents en position oxytonne en français pour marquer les GA (Santiago & Delais-Roussarie 2015 ;Schwab 2012 ;Barquero, 2012). Cependant, plusieurs différences sont observées entre la parole des apprenants et celle des natifs.…”

Pause insertion prediction using evaluation model of perceptual pause insertion naturalness

“…In previous studies dedicated to the intonation of questions in L2 French by Mexican Spanish speakers, it has been shown that learners often use the extra rising contours HH% in yes-no and wh-questions (se [4], [5]). The fig.…”

“…The horizontal dotted line in the figure represents the top of the speaker's range. From the data analyzed, [4] and [5] argued that the extrarising tonal form HH% could be attributed to an L1 transfer in the cases of yes-no questions, since this form is quite common in the Mexican Spanish variety. Yet, for wh-questions, an analysis in terms of transfer cannot be argued for, since this question type is generally produced with a falling contour L% in Spanish.…”

“…As final rises are usually HH% for Mexican native speakers (be they learners of French or not), they should rate HH% better than H% in yes-no declarative questions, whereas French native participants should rate H% better than HH%. In the case of yes-no questions, in which the interrogative modality is signaled by the morphosyntactic forms (as in (4) and (5)) as well as in wh-questions (as (6) and (7)), native listeners show a preference for H% and L% over HH%, which has rarely been observed in the data (see [4] and [5]). In the case of the L2 learners, we could expect to obtain the same results as for SL1 listeners, despite the fact that they use mostly the HH% contour.…”

“…Other factors have thus to be taken into consideration to explain singular prosodic forms of the L2 learners' grammar [3]. In previous work, for instance, we have shown that Mexican Spanish learners of L2 French produce systematically an extra-rising contour at the end of information-seeking questions (see [4] and [5]). Even if the occurrence of this form can be considered as resulting from a L1 transfer in yes-no questions, it is not possible in the case of wh-questions (see section 2.3 for more information).…”