The functional weight of a prosodic cue in the native language predicts the learning of speech segmentation in a second language

• Autores: Annie Tremblay, Mirjam Broersma, Caitlin E. Coughlin
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 21, Nº 3, 2018 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Themed section: Priming paradigms in bilingualism research), págs. 640-652
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study newly investigates whether the functional weight of a prosodic cue in the native language predicts listeners’ learning and use of that cue in second-language speech segmentation. It compares English and Dutch listeners’ use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. F0 rise signals word-initial boundaries in English and Dutch, but has a weaker functional weight in English than Dutch because it is more strongly correlated with vowel quality in English than Dutch. English- and Dutch-speaking learners of French matched in French proficiency and experience, and native French listeners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in French where they monitored words ending with/out an F0 rise (replication of Tremblay, Broersma, Coughlin & Choi, 2016). Dutch listeners made earlier/greater use of the F0 rise than English listeners, and in one condition they made greater use of F0 rise than French listeners, extending the cue-weighting theory to speech segmentation.