Role of prosody in L2 segmental perception of French clusters by Japanese learners

This paper focuses on the role of prosody in segmental perception of CCV clusters vs. CVCV sequences in French by Japanese speakers learning French. Previous studies report a heavy reliance on prosodic patterns for word segmentation in early stages of lexical acquisition (Christoph et al. 1995 for French; Jusczyk et al. 1999 for English). In the production of young children, consonant clusters are mostly resolved through consonant deletion (Bernhardt and Stemberger 1998): the result is that prosodic patterns remain more or less intact as compared to the adult target. In contrast, recent loanword studies show that consonant clusters are overwhelmingly resolved through vowel epenthesis rather than through consonant deletion (Paradis and Béland 2002; Uffmann 2004). This pattern seems to be also reflected in adult L2 production (Shinohara 1992). A consequence of vowel epenthesis is a distortion of prosody in the target language, the number of nuclei being increased. As production patterns may reflect adult speakers ’ insensitivity toward prosodic information in L2, this study tests if prosodic information is still exploited in access to segmental information in L2 speakers of French. We studied Japanese speakers ’ perception of minimal pair words in French differing onl