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Learning to Realize ProsodicProminence in L2 French and Spanish

Non-native prosodic prominence below the level of the sentence has been the subject of a considerable amount of research, in part because it contributes significantly to perceived foreign accent and lesser L2 speech intelligibility (e.g., Munro, 1995; Cutler, Dahan, & van Donselaar, 1997; Hahn, 2004; Field, 2005; Kang, 2010). Among the different prosodic phenomena one might investigate, studies have tested L2 learners’ placement of prominence within the relevant phonological domain (e.g., Archibald, 1998; Pater, 1997; Altmann, 2006; Ploquin, 2009 for L2 English; Dubeda, 2002; Barquero Armesto, 2012; Schwab, 2012 for L2 French; Menke & Face, 2010 for L2 Spanish; Rasier & Hiligsmann, 2007 for L2 Dutch) and their acquisition of the phonetic properties of its realization (e.g., Lansing, 2001 for L2 Spanish; Miglio & Chun, 2008 for L2 German & Spanish; Kondo, 2009 for L2 English). Such research has shown that both phonological and phonetic aspects of prominence may prove challenging to learners of all levels, even those of advanced proficiency (e.g., Dubeda, 2002; Altmann, 2006; Barquero Armesto, 2012). However, the issue of the relative difficulty in acquiring phonological versus phonetic aspects has yet to receive substantial attention, despite the fact that such research promises important insights into relative difficulty and phonological acquisition as a whole (but see Miglio & Chun, 2008, and Altmann, 2006; Kijak, 2009, on relative difficulty and the L2 acquisition of the phonetics and phonology of prominence respectively). The current study examines the relative difficulty and acquisition of sub-utterance prominence (lexical prominence in Spanish; post-lexical prominence in French) with a particular focus on the role of L1-based cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and typological similarity between learners’ L1 and the target language. Specifically, we investigate how two groups of learners with the same L1 (English) acquire phonological and phonetic properties of prominence in two different target languages, one of them being more similar to English in terms of prosodic typology (Spanish), the other being very different (French). Whereas English and Spanish are similar in terms of the phonologically-determined location of prominence, they differ in several respects of their phonetic realization, including the presence of vowel reduction in English non-prominent syllables. French contrasts relatively even more with English, differing not only in terms of the phonetics but also in the phonological placement of prominence. Based on CLI, we predict superior performance by the learners of Spanish in terms of prominence placement (Hypothesis 1). However, we hypothesize that both learners of French and Spanish will experience difficulties with the phonetic parameters, namely vowel quality in nonprominent syllables (Hypothesis 2) and the prominent-to-non-prominent vowel duration ratio (Hypothesis 3). The data, taken from the Romance Language Survey housed within the University of