Effects of the Native Language on the Learning of Fundamental Frequency in Second-Language Speech Segmentation.

Annie Tremblay,Jiyoun Choi,Mirjam Broersma,Caitlin E Coughlin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00985

Annie Tremblay, Jiyoun Choi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00985

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Abstract

This study investigates whether the learning of prosodic cues to word boundaries in speech segmentation is more difficult if the native and second/foreign languages (L1 and L2) have similar (though non-identical) prosodies than if they have markedly different prosodies (Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis). It does so by comparing French, Korean, and English listeners’ use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. F0 rise signals phrase-final boundaries in French and Korean but word-initial boundaries in English. Korean-speaking and English-speaking L2 learners of French, who were matched in their French proficiency and French experience, and native French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they recognized words whose final boundary was or was not cued by an increase in F0. The results showed that Korean listeners had greater difficulty using F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French than French and English listeners. This suggests that L1–L2 prosodic similarity can make the learning of an L2 segmentation cue difficult, in line with the proposed Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis. We consider mechanisms that may underlie this difficulty and discuss the implications of our findings for understanding listeners’ phonological encoding of L2 words.

Highlights

The segmentation of continuous speech into individual words is a challenging task for non-native listeners, in that cues to word boundaries differ across languages
We focus on F0 because it provides an easier and clearer test of the hypothesis that the learning of L2 segmentation cues is shaped by the degree of similarity between the L1 and the L2. 3F0 rise does not cue word-final boundaries within phrases in French
The present study investigated whether the learning of prosodic cues to word boundaries in speech segmentation is more difficult if the L1 and L2 have similar prosodies than if they have markedly different prosodies

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The segmentation of continuous speech into individual words is a challenging task for non-native listeners, in that cues to word boundaries differ across languages. The present study tests the Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis by examining how Korean- and English-speaking L2 learners of French use F0 rise to locate phrase-final ( word-final) boundaries in French.. Kim and Cho (2009) showed that Korean listeners benefited from lengthening at least under some circumstances.4 English differs from both French and Korean in that prominence is lexical rather than phrasal, and pitch accents are aligned with stressed syllables and they are not necessarily phrase-final (e.g., Beckman and Elam, 1997). If the learning of a new segmentation cue is more difficult when the L1 and L2 prosodic systems are similar than when they are different, Korean L2 learners of French should have more difficulty in using F0 cues to word-final boundaries in French than both native French listeners and English L2 learners of French. The use of eye tracking will allow us to determine if Korean L2 learners of French have more difficulty than English L2 learners of French in using F0 cues to wordfinal boundaries in French, and if English L2 learners of French can learn to use F0 cues to word-final boundaries in French, something that was not found in Tremblay et al (2012)

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