Exploring L2 learner intonation to develop a phonological ...lewebpedagogique.com/fabiansantiago/files/2012/02/... · In B. Bel & I. Marlien (eds.) Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004,

LEARNER DATA

Methodology: A cross-comparison between native and non-native learner productions has been carried out. Speakers: Data Collection: Corpus adapted from COREIL methodology.

v  Contrastive analysis in L1 (French and Spanish) and L2. v  Integration of different oral tasks. (Delais-Roussarie & Yoo, 2011)

Tasks: Reading of passages from EUROM 1 Corpus and oral interaction. (Chan et al.,1995) Orthographic Transcription & Prosodic Notation: v  TEI recommendations. v  Perceptual criteria with Prosogramm.(Mertens, 2004)

Exploring L2 learner intonation to develop a phonological analysis of final rises in French

Fabian SANTIAGO VARGAS & Elisabeth DELAIS-ROUSSARIE CNRS - UMR 7110 - LABORATOIRE DE LINGUISTIQUE FORMELLE

[email protected] & [email protected]

Background Our study aims at proposing a phonological analysis of melodic rises occurring at the end of yes/no neutral questions. In French intonation, rising movements are usually seen as playing a major role. However, two points concerning the status and the form of these movements are still under debate: (i) because of the syncretism between intonation and accentuation, these movements may be considered as boundary phenomena or as the tonal manifestation of an accent; (ii) among the rising movements occurring at the end of an IP, a distinction is usually proposed between major continuation and interrogative contour (see, among others, Delattre, 1966), the contrast between the two contours coming from to their shapes (concave vs. convex contours). Aim Exploring L2 learner intonation in order (i) to see what would be the best way to represent the nuclear contour associated with yes/no question (H*H%, H*HH%, etc.); (ii) to decide if the alignment position of the pitch target and the range it attains are crucial in describing nuclear contours. The observations made lead us to propose to integrate the internal structure of the IP in the definition of nuclear tunes. Side effects v  Have a better understanding of the acquisition of intonation in French by L2 learners. v  Propose to adapt current prosodic annotation systems for L2 learner data.

Short question in Mexican Spanish

Declarative question with est-ce que in French Declarative question with inversion in French

Long question in Mexican Spanish

CONCLUSIONS The integration of internal structure is necessary in order to describe IPs in French: the form of nuclear contour (HH%, LH%, H%...) is less important for a phonological description than phrasing: (i) if AP is not prosodically marked, the sentence is not licit, even if the IP ends with a H%. (ii)

if prenuclear accented syllables are no tonally marked but lengthened, the sentence is OK. (iii) if AP are marked with H* and H% or HH% in IP-final, the sentence is OK.

v  HH% contour is realized as a sharp rise. v In Spanish interrogative sentences it is possible for prenuclear accents not to be marked by significative mouvements of F0. (Sosa, 1999)

v  H% is the most common contour. Nevertheless, a L% or 0% are possible. v  The pronoun subject inverted is always marked by a H target. v  The AP are marked by a movement of F0 in all the cases. (Di Cristo, 2010)

v  (L)H*H% is the most common contour in IP-final. v  The penultimate syllable is either high or level. (Delattre, 1966; Di Cristo, 2010)

v  L* (L)H% was observed in our data; v  a F0 fall is realized in penultimate syllable and is followed by a rise. (De la Mota et al., 2010)

v H% is the most common boundary tone observed but it does not always attain the highest level of the speakers range, at the phonetic level. v  The syllable que is normally marked by a H target and it is the most most salient syllable in the utterance. (Delattre, 1966; Di Cristo, 2010)

REFERENCES v  Chan, D. et al. (1995). EUROM. A Spoken Language Resource for the EU. In Proceedings EUROSPEECH’95. pp. 867-870. v  De la Mota, C., Butragueño, P. M. & Prieto, P. (2010). Mexican Spanish intonation. In P. Prieto, P.; Roseano, P. (eds.) Transcription of Intonation of the Spanish Language. Lincom Europa: München. v  Delais-Roussarie E. & Yoo, H.-Y. (2011). Learner Corpora and Prosody: from de COREIL Corpus to principles on data collection and corpus design. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 47 (1), pp. 26-29. v  Delattre, P. (1969). Les dix intonations de base du français. The French Review, 40 (1), pp. 1-14. v  Di Cristo, A. (2010). A propos des intonations de base du français. Soumis à publication. v  Mertes, P. (2004). The Prosogramm: Semi-automatic Transcription of Prosody Based on a Tonal Perception Model. In B. Bel & I. Marlien (eds.) Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004, Nara (Japan), 23-26 March. (ISBN 2-9518233-1-2) v Sosa, J.M. (1999). La entonación del español. Su estructura fónica, variabilidad y dialectología. Madrid: Cátedra.

Short question in French

Group Number Average Age Mexican Learners of

French L2 Level A2 6 22.8 B1 9 26.6

French Native Speakers 10 35.3 Spanish Native Speakers 8 26.4

Total 33 26.4

Type Category Example Language Number of utterances

Yes /

No

Declaratives Tu viens?

French L1 23 French L2 30

¿Vienes? Spanish L1 48 Subject

Inversion Viens-tu? French L1 12 French L2 13

Est-ce que Est-ce que tu viens?

French L1 25 French L2 28

Total 179

Typology of questions

Short question produced without native-like intonation patterns.

Long question produced whithout native-like intonation patterns

* AP unmarked and LH%

* AP unmarked and HH%

* AP lengthened and HH%

* AP marked and HH%

Question with inversion produced with near native-like intonation patterns

Question with inversion produced without native-like patterns but acoustically similar to French intonation .