Acoustic correlates of L2 prosodic boundaries by German learners of French

International audienceDeviations in L2 intonation affect a number of prosodic characteristics including pitch range, declination line, or the rises of non-final IPs, and might lead to misunderstandings or contribute to the perception of foreign-accent. This study investigates the characteristics of non-native speech at the boundary between prosodic constituents. We analyzed a French declarative sentence, extracted from the IFCASL corpus (www.ifcasl.org), made up of four constituents and pronounced with a neutral intonation. Each constituent has three syllables and the sentence is realized typically by French speakers with four accentual –prosodic- groups, corresponding to the four constituents. Fourty German learners of French (beginners, and advanced speakers) and fifty four French speakers read the sentence once. We used the software ProsodyPro from Yi Xu for the prosodic analysis. We determined the presence of pauses and evaluated for each prosodic group: the (normalized) F0 maximum on the last syllable; the F0 excursion (max-min) of the final contour, and its maximum of velocity. In order to analyze the temporal course of F0 on the final contour, we also compared the values of the F0 excursion on the vowel and before it. On the basis of acoustic cues, non-native speakers, especially beginners, appear to realize more important prosodic boundaries (in particular higher F0 maxima, especially at the very end of the prosodic group, and more pauses) than French speakers, whereas native speakers appear to show more anticipation