Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage - Elena Babatsouli

Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage - Elena Babatsouli

9. The Impact of Production Complexity in German L2 by French Native Speakers: Focus on /h/ and Vowel Duration Contrast

Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage - Elena Babatsouli

Jane Wottawa [+-]
University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
Jane Wottawa is a certified high-school German teacher in France. Since 2014, she is a PhD candidate at University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 in the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP, UMR 7018). Her research interests are centered on foreign language learning with a special focus on speech production and perception. Her research is based on acoustic and phonetic analyses in L2 speech production as well as behavioral and neuroimaging methods in speech perception.
Martine Adda-Decker [+-]
University Paris-Sud (Orsay)
Martine Adda-Decker holds a MD in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science from University Paris-Sud (Orsay) France. She is a CNRS researcher since 1990. In 2010, she joined the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP, UMR 7018), her previous position was with the Spoken Language Processing group at LIMSI (UPR 3251), where she remains an associate researcher. Her research interests go to man-machine communication, language and accent identification, multilingual speech recognition, acoustic-phonetic and lexical modeling, pronunciation variants, corpus phonetics, phonology and corpus-based studies. Martine Adda-Decker has authored or co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles in the field. She is regularly reviewing papers in the major Speech related journals and conferences.
Frédéric Isel [+-]
University Paris Lumières – Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Frédéric Isel is Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University Paris Lumières – Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense in France. His research is centered on the study of the neurodynamics of language processes involved in both word recognition and sentence comprehension. In particular, Frédéric Isel investigates the role of linguistic prosody in lexical acess and parsing. He also studies second language acquisition (SLA) and examines the link between language use and language control. His research employs both behavioral and neuroimaging methods.

Description

Research on foreign language speech production often focuses on repeated speech and read speech. To the best of our knowledge, only a few studies have investigated the role of the complexity of speech production tasks on the abilities to produce sounds in a foreign language. The present study aims to fill this gap. We recorded adult French native speakers with German as a second language (L2). The participants performed three speech tasks: word repetition, reading and picture description. Note that, the picture description task is a semi-spontaneous speech task, which can be considered to be closer to a real life speech experience than the two other tasks. We assume that L2 production complexity depends upon the three tasks and on the linguistic information provided: the sound in the repetition, the text in reading, and no linguistic information in picture description. We created two corpora of German speech: the FLACGS and the ProFee-FLACGS corpora. The speech resources were analysed regarding word initial /h/ and vowel duration contrast production. Taken together, our results show that both increasing L2 speech production complexity as well as conflicting grapheme-phoneme conventions in the two languages have an impact on production accuracy in L2 speech. Moreover, L2 learners tend to achieve native like productions when provided with a native German auditory input. Awareness of pronunciation differences between ones first and second language can help with the amount of correct sound production but it has very limited impact on the accuracy of the produced sounds.

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Citation

Wottawa, Jane; Adda-Decker, Martine; Isel, Frédéric. 9. The Impact of Production Complexity in German L2 by French Native Speakers: Focus on /h/ and Vowel Duration Contrast. Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 255-285 Jan 2018. ISBN 9781781795644. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=31679. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.31679. Jan 2018

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