Déclaration ou question ?

This exploratory study examined the perception of interrogative and declarative intonation by foreigners learning French. Sentences with three syntactic/lexical difficulty levels were recorded twice by two native speakers of French, once with a declarative intonation and once with an interrogative intonation. The sentences were presented auditorily to learners of different French proficiency levels and to native French speakers. The participants’ task was to decide whether each sentence heard was a statement or a question. Responses and response times were recorded. The results showed that for all listeners, interrogative sentences were identified 100 ms faster on average than declarative sentences, and simple sentences were processed faster than difficult ones. Like the native speakers, the learners were able to distinguish the two types of intonation. However, there were some clear-cut differences in response time between learners and native speakers, and between learners of different French proficiency levels. Among the non-native speakers, more-proficient learners responded significantly faster than less-proficient ones did