Prosodic effects on L2 French vowels: a corpus-based investigation

Fabian Santiago (1, 2, 3) , Paolo Mairano

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
2 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage
3 LLF - UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

We examine the effects of prosodic strengthening on the acoustic realization of L2 French oral vowels. We analyse 12,283 vowels produced by 20 learners of French (L1 Spanish and English) and 10 native speakers according to different prosodic positions: (i) IP-final (ii) AP-final (obligatory accent) or AP-initial (initial non-obligatory accent) and (iii) word-internal unaccented. We computed the convex hull area of F1/F2 and F2/F3 spaces, Euclidean distances and vowel durations. Results show that the L2 vowel space is expanded in strong prosodic positions. Differently from what we observe for native French speakers, vowel expansion does not consistently reflect the prosodic hierarchy for the two groups of learners. We discuss these results in the light of L2 acquisition phonology.

Mots clés: prosodic strengthening; L2 French vowels; vowel space

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Linguistique

Fabian Santiago, Paolo Mairano. Prosodic effects on L2 French vowels: a corpus-based investigation. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019, pp.1084-1088, 2019, Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019. ⟨halshs-02984539⟩