The Acquisition of Question Intonation by Mexican Spanish Learners of French

Abstract

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.