Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie

Introduction: Regards croisés sur la prosodie du français – des données à la modélisation

Ce volume thematique regroupe un ensemble de contributions portant sur la description et la modelisation de la prosodie en francais. Ces articles ont ete choisis afin de proposer un panorama assez large des travaux menes actuellement dans ce domaine.

The Acquisition of Question Intonation by Mexican Spanish Learners of French

In this chapter, we analyze the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in yes/no and wh-questions in French as an L2 produced by Mexican Spanish learners. Our study consists in a cross-comparison of information-seeking interrogatives recorded in French and Mexican Spanish in various settings and produced by 15 Mexican learners of French (L2), 10 French speakers, and 10 Mexican speakers. Analyses of the data show some differences between native and nonnative productions: (i) an overuse of rising tunes is observed in the learners’ productions in all question types; in addition, an extra-rising contour is frequently used; and (ii) the internal prosodic structure in long sentences is generally not marked by tonal cues (e.g., pitch accents) in learners’ productions. These patterns could be partly viewed as resulting from an L1 transfer in the case of yes/no questions, since similar prosodic patterns were found in the Spanish native speakers’ productions. However, this hypothesis is not confirmed by the analysis of wh-questions: native speakers have a tendency to use a large variety of final tunes whereas learners use almost only rising contours, in particular, the extra-rising one. These results could lead to consider that L1 transfer in the acquisition of L2 prosody does not account for all learners’ prosodic patterns. Alternate hypotheses may be put forward to account for the realizations observed: (i) a prosodic simplification, or (ii) the idea that some rises may be used to express some sort of linguistic insecurity.

Learner corpora and prosody: From the COREIL corpus to principles on data collection and corpus design

Abstract Studies in L2 intonation and phrasal phonology are interesting not only to understand how second languages (L2) are acquired, but also to get better insights into the phonology of the target language itself. Indeed, clear descriptions are still missing for many intonational and phrasal phenomena; and analysing the speech production of L2 learners may help in analyzing phenomena that have remained unnoticed up to now (e.g. grammatical and prosodic constraints that operate in case of self-repairs, and phonological status of some prosodic events). We propose a close look at a well-designed corpus, as an introduction to this research perspective. The aim of the present contribution is twofold: (i) to present the COREIL corpus, an electronic oral learner corpus that has been designed to study the acquisition of phrasal phonology and intonation in French and English as a foreign language; (ii) to explain the principles used to collect and annotate the data. The data collection protocol is developed to be as modular as possible: for instance, it can be used to gather data produced by children as well as by adults. The protocol is intended as an easy-to-use tool that can be modified by the research community. It allows for a comparison of acquisition processes along several dimensions (L1 vs. L2, differences among L1 learners, etc).