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Impact of fluency and segmental categorization in L2: the case of French final fricatives uttered by German speakers

This study examines the effects of L1/L2 interferences at the segmental level, and of lack of fluency at the sentence level, on the realizations of French final fricatives by German learners. Due to L1/L2 interference, German speakers tend to devoice French final fricatives. A well-known effect of the lack of L2 mastering is the decrease of the speech articulation rate, which lengthens segment average duration. In order to better apprehend the impact of categorization and fluency, we selected four series of consonants from the IFCASL corpus, i.e. voiced and unvoiced fricatives uttered by French native (FF) and German non-native (GF) speakers. The realizations of unvoiced consonants uttered by GF speakers are essentially dependent upon fluency, whereas the realizations of voiced consonants by the same speakers are dependent upon both fluency and categorization. We evaluated a set of acoustic cues related to the voicing distinction-including consonant duration and periodicity-, and submitted the data to a hierarchical clustering analysis (HCPC, from R, FactoMineR package). Results, discussed as a function of speaker's level and prosodic boundaries, confirmed the mutual importance of fluency and segmental categorization on non-native realizations.