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1.2.1.2 Vowels
The English language makes a distinction between “pure vowels”, or monophthongs, on the one hand (i.e. lax vowels: /æ, e, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?/, and tense vowels except diphthongs: /?:, i:, ?:, u:, ??/), and diphthongs on the other, which are all tense vowels: /??, ??, ??, ??, a?, e?, e?, a?/(3). As far […]
1.2.2. Suprasegmental difficulties and recurrent errors
Although most French EFL learners do not realize it, they have a number of problems with English rhythm and prosody (Mortreux, 2008), all the more as they often prefer to practise vowel production, thus producing full vowels only and not realizing vowel reduction naturally. Burgess and Spencer (2000) used questionnaires that they gave to EFL […]
1.2.2.1 Intonation
The suprasegmental feature of English phonology that can be said to be the least problematic to French EFL learners is intonation. Roach (2009: 3) defines it as “the use of the pitch of the voice to convey meaning”. Halliday’s (1967) analysis of intonation is quite relevant and has been taken up many times in the […]
1.2.2.2 Lexical stress
English and French have totally different views of stress, hence the frequency of errors. Vaissière (2002: 6) describes how French speakers perceive stress: “The notion of (lexical) stress is indeed very elusive for French natives. They only discover the existence of that unnatural and unnecessary complication when they have to learn a foreign language”. Still, […]
1.2.2.3 Rhythm
Abercrombie (1967: 96) remarks that “all human speech possesses rhythm”. The rhythm of a language is mainly constituted by the way the language uses stresses (sometimes called rhythmic beats) and accents (or pitch prominences). Bertrán (1999: 126) reminds the reader that “in linguistics, the word rhythm is a metaphor, borrowed from music”. If a music […]
1.2.3. French vs. English: syllable- and stress-timing theory
The terms “syllable-timing” and “stress-timing” are used in the theory of isochrony, according to which some languages have isochronous syllable-durations, and others have isochronous inter-stress intervals (Pike, 1945; Abercrombie, 1967, among others). The aim here is not to debate over the existence or not of isochrony, but rather to enhance the difference between the prosodies […]
1.3. Conclusion
Although they are treated in separate sections in this work, segmentals and suprasegmentals are interdependent, whatever the language, since together they form the phonological system of a language. For example, the learning of lexical stress and rhythm implies the notions of vowel reduction, schwa, etc. Errors and difficulties involving both individual sounds and prosody have […]
CHAPTER 2. PHONOLOGY AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
2.1. Phonology and First Language Acquisition 2.1.1. Perception of English: from suprasegments to segments 2.1.2. Production of English segments and suprasegments 2.1.3. Conclusion: from L1 to L2 2.2. Phonology and L2 acquisition 2.2.1. Segmentals and L2 acquisition 2.2.2. Suprasegmentals and L2 acquisition 2.2.3. Comparative studies of L2 segmentals and suprasegmentals 2.3. Conclusion Retour au menu […]
2.1. Phonology and First Language Acquisition
In order to understand how speakers of a certain language acquire the phonology of a second or foreign language (L2), the linguistic development and the acquisition process of the L1 phonology in infants should first be surveyed. Crystal (1970: 77) points out that “the study of prosodic features – of intonation, in particular – had […]
2.1.1. Perception of English: from suprasegments to segments
The acquisition of the L1 phonology occurs in different stages, roughly corresponding to different ages of the infant. As far as perception capacities are concerned, Kaplan and Kaplan (1971) notice that the division into distinct stages is not so clear as it can be for production (cf. 2.1.2. below). Nevertheless, general patterns seem to be […]
2.1.2. Production of English segments and suprasegments
Children begin to speak between eighteen and twenty-four months of age (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1971: 358). The “primitive lexical items”, that is, what sound like first words, are “the result of the imitation of adults’ forms” (Crystal, 1970: 80). Concerning the chronology of early vocalization, Abercrombie (1967) attests that it can be divided into several […]
2.1.3. Conclusion: from L1 to L2
Just like perceptual capacities, the influence of the mother tongue on the infant’s production capacities appears quickly. Johnson and Reimers (2010) note that the L1 influence is already present as early as babbling. Following Best’s (1995, for example) Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), the close link that exists between perception and production accounts for the way […]
2.2. Phonology and L2 acquisition
Although the one abbreviation “L2” is generally used, it is important to keep in mind the difference between the acquisition of a second language, implying that the language is learned in the target country, and a foreign language, i.e. it is learned in one’s home country, typically as an academic subject. Just like the acquisition […]
2.2.1. Segmentals and L2 acquisition
As was said in the previous section, the influence of the L1 phonological system starts very early in newborn infants. In the first years of life, while the L1 influence develops rapidly but is still quite recent, the acquisition of an L2 remains easy for these early learners, contrary to late learners like teenagers or […]
2.2.2. Suprasegmentals and L2 acquisition
As is reported by Mennen (2006): In a survey of major international journals in second language acquisition of the past twenty-five years carried out by Gut (personal communication), it was found that as few as nine studies investigated intonation and tone. Only four of these studies were concerned with perception of intonation, the other five […]
2.2.3. Comparative studies of L2 segmentals and suprasegmentals
While many researchers and even foreign language teachers acknowledge that the acquisition of L2 suprasegmentals has more importance in intelligibility than the acquisition of L2 segmentals, very few experimental studies compare the role of each, whether in perception or production. Instead, it seems as if the importance of one over the other had only been […]
2.3. Conclusion
In L1 acquisition, prosody has an important place in so far as it is the first linguistic element that infants can perceive, long before they can discriminate phonemic contrasts. As far as production is concerned, the first words are usually associated with the articulation of phonemes. Yet, prosody is also present at that stage, and […]
CHAPTER 3. PILOT EXPERIMENT: OBJECTIVE AND PROCEDURE
3.1. Objective and hypothesis 3.2. Procedure 3.2.1. Subjects 3.2.2. Experimental procedure Stimuli Group formation Pre-training recording Trainings Post-training recordings 3.2.3. Listener-judges and rating procedure 3.3. Summary Retour au menu : Experimental research into the acquisition of English rhythm and prosody by French learners
3.1. Objective and hypothesis
As was said in the conclusion of Chapter 1, it is important to bear in mind that segments and prosody are interdependent. Given the true difficulties that French speakers encounter with English pronunciation, the teaching of both aspects should be included in L2 pronunciation lessons in France. Although the production of phonemes is focused on […]
3.2. Procedure
3.1. Objective and hypothesis 3.2. Procedure 3.2.1. Subjects 3.2.2. Experimental procedure Stimuli Group formation Pre-training recording Trainings Post-training recordings 3.2.3. Listener-judges and rating procedure 3.3. Summary Retour au menu : Experimental research into the acquisition of English rhythm and prosody by French learners
3.2.1. Subjects
As the objective of the experiment is to investigate the importance of prosody in the production of English by French EFL learners, in comparison with the importance of segments, it was necessary to find an even number of native French speakers. The subjects who participated in the experiment were recruited through oral announcements at the […]
3.2.2. Experimental procedure
3.2.2.1 Stimuli 3.2.2.2 Group formation 3.2.2.3 Pre-training recordings 3.2.2.4 Trainings 3.2.2.5 Post-training recordings Retour au menu : Experimental research into the acquisition of English rhythm and prosody by French learners
3.2.2.1 Stimuli
Just as in Birdsong’s (2003) experiment, both words (W) and phrases (P) were used to avoid bias towards either group – one group worked on prosody, i.e. especially at the sentencelevel, whereas the other (segmental) group mainly worked at the phoneme-level and wordlevel. For that matter, it is crucial to use both types of item […]
3.2.2.2 Group formation
The ten French-speaking volunteers were divided into two groups of five (see Appendix B), each consisting of three female French speakers and two male French speakers in order to avoid inequality. Group A – from Subject 1 to Subject 5 – was the segment-based group, and Group B – from Subject 6 to Subject 10 […]
3.2.2.3 Pre-training recordings
The first step of the experiment was to have all French-speaking participants record the stimuli a first time, so as to have control recordings and allow subsequent comparisons between the pre-training productions and the post-training productions within each group. The recordings took place in a quiet room at the University of Lille III. The materials […]
3.2.2.4 Trainings
When the pre-training recording sessions were over, the trainings could start. Group A received a training on English individual sounds, and Group B received a training on English rhythm and prosody. The trainings took place in an empty room at the University of Lille III, and they lasted a few hours each. Since all five […]
3.2.2.5 Post-training recordings
The post-training recordings were carried out in the exact same conditions as the pretraining recordings. For the second recording sessions, the subjects were supposed to take into account all that was done during their respective trainings, although this was not made clear or explicitly compulsory to them. That method reinforced the similarity with a typical […]
3.2.3. Listener-judges and rating procedure
For the ratings of the productions, we followed Derwing, Munro and Wiebe’s (1998), Missaglia’s (1999), and Birdsong’s (2003) experiments, in so far as we resorted to subjective evaluations by listeners. Three listener-judges kindly accepted to score all four hundred items, despite the large amount of work and time that it implied(2) – using the scores […]
3.3. Summary
Thanks to the ten participants and the three listener-judges, this pilot experiment was carried out in good conditions. Despite some people’s constraints of time, every recording and rating was completed well. Typical French-speaking non-English students participated. Furthermore, the trainings of the experiment were redolent of typical pronunciation classes in a secondary school or to non-specialists. […]
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