Transfer

  • Mathieu AVANZI (Neuchâtel, Suisse)
    Prosody and language contact: the case of federal French in Switzerland
    2013, Vol. XVIII-2, pp. 77-90

    This study aims at examining the accentual properties of a variety of L2 French commonly called “Français Fédéral”, a variety of French spoken in Switzerland by speakers who have a Swiss-German dialect as their mother tongue. We compared the data of 4 groups of 4 speakers: 2 groups of 4 native French speakers from Neuchâtel and from Paris, and 2 groups of 4 Swiss-German French speakers from Bern and Zürich. The data were semi-automatically processed, and three main prosodic features relating to accentuation were examined: metrical weight of the Accentual Phrase, respect of Accentual Phrase formation constraints (ALIGN-XHEAD and *CLASH), and proportion of secondary accents. Our findings regarding the two first parameters suggest that speakers of “Français Fédéral” share several features with a lexical accentuation system rather than with a supra-lexical accentuation system, albeit that the hypothesis of transfer fails to explain the high proportion of secondary accents encountered in the production of non-native speakers.


  • Christoph GABRIEL (Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz)
    La production du VOT chez des apprenants plurilingues du français langue étrangère : l’influence du russe et du turc comme langues d’origine
    2018, Vol. XXIII-1, pp. 59-72

    We analyze the production of [±voiced] stops in French as a foreign language by multilingual learners who speak Russian or Turkish as a heritage language along with their dominant language, German. Control data produced by monolingually raised German learners are taken into account. It is shown that the bilingual learners perform more target-like than the monolinguals for the voiceless stops /ptk/, but not for their voiced counterparts /bdɡ/. This suggests that the (non-)aspiration of voiceless stops is perceptually more salient for the learners than the presence or absence of pre-voicing in the realization of voiceless stops. We interpret our overall results as an example of an at least partial multilingual advantage in foreign language learning.