Exploring the production and perception of word stress by French-speaking learners of Dutch

Exploring the production and perception of word stress of French-speaking learners of Dutch The aim of L2 learners is basically to be understood by the people they are interacting with. In French-speaking Belgium, Dutch is taught to most pupils as it is one of Belgium’s national languages. While the fields of grammar and vocabulary are extensively dealt with in L2 teaching, prosody is still underrepresented in teaching and research. This is true for English, but even more so for Dutch. However, over the last decade the crucial role of prosody for the success of communication has been demonstrated thanks to studies on word stress and sentence stress (see Hahn 2004 for L2 English and the small-scaled studies by Caspers, 2009; 2010 for L2 Dutch) and pronunciation and prosody as a whole (see Derwing & Munro, 2005 for L2 English). These studies conclude that an L2 speaker is more intelligible and earns more positive judgment when his prosody is correct. Dutch, as English, has an unpredictable word stress (‘woordklemtoon’ in Dutch), whereas French has a fixed final word group prominence. Word stress enables the Dutch listener to fasten the process of word recognition (Cutler & van Donselaar, 2001) (Cutler & Donselaar, 2001) (Cutler & Donselaar, 2001), which is less the case in French (Dupoux & Peperkamp, 2002). It is also especially useful in adverse listening conditions such as noise, or typically, when the listener is confronted with deviant segments of L2 speech (see van Heuven, 2008) where it can become a powerful tool for word recognition. Unlike Dutch sentence stress (Rasier, 2006), the field of Dutch word stress by speakers of French had not been investigated since recently. Michaux (2010) and Michaux et al. (2011) aimed at filling this gap by investigating French learners of Dutch word stress production. The prosodic differences of French and Dutch led us to hypothesize that the French final pattern would have an influence on the way Francophone L2-learners stress Dutch words. As a result of prosodic transfer (see Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008 for more information on transfer), these learners were expected to stress the final syllable most often. Two groups of informants were used: a beginner and an advanced group of Francophone learners of Dutch. The conclusion was that the beginners made more stress position errors than the advanced learners. Furthermore, the beginners were more influenced by their mother tongue prosodic structure, which led them to erroneously stress the last syllable of Dutch words more often. They also did this in the majority of words where stress should not actually have been final. Also, it was shown that the advanced group of informants had moved away from this word-final L1 pattern, as they stressed the penultimate syllable more often. This conclusion might seem straightforward, but it is in fact all the more remarkable as word stress (and prosody in general) is generally left aside in L2 Dutch classes. This means that learners - even if their own prosodic system does not have a mobile word stress pattern - are still able to pick it up by themselves. However, by stressing the penultimate syllable, the advanced learners still did not get the word stress position right, because far from all Dutch words actually have penultimate stress. This emphasizes the important and positive guiding role the teaching of Dutch prosody could have on L2 learners in Belgian classrooms. The new question that arises at present is how deviant word stress is perceived by native speakers of Dutch and Francophone learners of Dutch. The new research that is being set up aims at answering the following questions: how detrimental is a wrong word stress position to the intelligibility in native listeners of Dutch (see Derwing & Munro, 2005; Munro & Derwing, 2006)? What is a native listener’s subjective judgment on deviant stress and where is his limit of acceptance? Do non-native (French-speaking) listeners recognize the mis-stressed words, as word stress does not help word recognition in French? In other words, does transfer occur in the perception of learners when listening to an L2? And finally, is French-accented Dutch more intelligible to French-speaking learners as they share the same language background (as suggested by Bent & Bradlow, 2003) than to native speakers of Dutch (see van Heuven & Wang, 2007)? This current research aims at getting a better overview of how deviant speech is perceived by natives and non-natives and if the way a learner has acquired word recognition in his mother tongue is transferred to the perception of an L2. Bent, T., & Bradlow, A. R. (2003). The Interlanguage Speech Benefit. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 114(3), 1600-1610. Caspers, J. (2009). The perception of word stress in existing and non-existing Dutch words by native speakers and second language learners. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 25-38. Caspers, J. (2010). The influence of erroneous stress position and segmental errors on intelligibility, comprehensibility and foreign accent in Dutch as a second language. Linguistics in the Netherlands 2010, 15-27. Cutler, A., & Donselaar, W., van. (2001). Voornaam is not (really) a homophone: Lexical Prosody and Lexical Access in Dutch. Language and Speech, 44(2), 171-195. Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2005). Second language accent and pronunciation teaching: A research-based approach. TESOL Quarterly, 39(3), 379-397. Dupoux, E., & Peperkamp, S. (2002). Fossil markers of language development: phonological deafnesses in a dult speech processing. In B. Laks, Durand, J. (Ed.), Phonetics, Phonology and Cognition (pp. 168-190). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hahn, D. (2004). Primary stress and intelligibility: Research to motivate the teaching of suprasegmentals. TESOL Quarterly, 38, 201-223. Heuven, V. J., van. (2008). Making sense of strange sounds: (Mutual) intelligibility of related language varieties: A review. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 2, 39-62. Heuven, V. J., van, & Wang, H. (2007). Quantifying the Interlanguage Speech Benefit. Paper presented at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrücken. Jarvis, S., & Pavlenko, A. (2008). Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. New York/London: Routledge. Michaux, M.-C. (2010). De evolutie van de tussentaal bij Franstalige leerders van het Nederlands. Onderzoek naar klemtoonverwerving. MA Thesis. Université catholique de Louvain. Michaux, M.-C., Hiligsmann, P., & Rasier, L. (2011). Het klemtoonpatroon in de tussentaal van Franstalige leerders van het Nederlands. In I. Grucza (Ed.), Vielheit und Einheit der Germanistik weltweit XII: Kongress der IVG. Munro, M. J., Derwing, T. M., & Morton, S. L. (2006). The mutual intelligibility of L2 speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 111-131. Rasier, L. (2006). Prosodie en vreemdetaalverwerving. Accentdistributie in het Frans en het Nederlands als vreemde taal. Université catholique de Louvain.