French conversations do not show evidence of phonetic accommodation to a non-native interlocutor

Abstract

Although a speech style known as foreigner talk has been described, speech addressed to a reasonably fluent non-native interlocutor may show little or no accommodation by native speakers. This issue is of interest in understanding whether on-line modifications to speech are an important contributor to phonetic variation. Ten native speakers of Parisian French were recorded individually as they performed map tasks, one with another native speaker of French, and another with an American who identified himself as such at the beginning of the conversation, but who spoke French during the task. Previous work has found that French listeners who heard brief extracts from these conversations could not reliably identify which interlocutor was involved. In an attempt to identify other possible differences in speech to natives and non-natives, two prosodic characteristics of the conversations were analyzed, vowel devoicing and the epenthesis of word-final schwas. The hypothesis was that vowel devoicing, which is stylistically marked, would be disfavored in speech to non-natives, while schwa epenthesis, characteristic of a deliberate speech style, would be more frequent. The speakers actually showed similar patterns with both interlocutors, suggesting that variation in these properties is not conditioned by the linguistic status of the interlocutor.