Main Content
Unlearning distributions of weak elements: Evidence from German-Turkish learners of L3 French
Project overview
This project is part of the Research Unit 5757 »Weak Elements in Phonology: Development, Processing, and Modality«.
Project details
Weak elements, such as reduced syllables in second position of German trochees, may cause difficulties in learning languages whose prosodic structure is less word-based and characterized by a rather phrasal prosody. In such a language – French being a prime example – the prosodic structure is governed by the phrase, and not by the word. A German learner of French may thus transfer the strong-weak pattern of the canonical German trochee (i.e., a preference for initial stress) to French, deviating from the expected French prosody. Other languages, such as Turkish, are considered to combine aspects of German and French insofar as the stress system either allows (word)initial or final stress. A Turkish learner of French is thus less likely to exclusively transfer a preference for initial stress to French, thus, will show less deviation from the target prosody. Bilingual, German-Turkish learners of French, finally, may capitalize on the availability of several stress-strategies and might be even better in achieving the French target prosody. To this end, the current project investigates prosodic transfer effects in second and third language learning, exemplified by the languages German, Turkish, and French, with a focus on weak elements. Starting from German, it seems that a successful mastering of French goes hand in hand with unlearning the distribution of weak elements governed by the dominant trochaic pattern. The project combines measures of speech production and perception. First, production patterns of native speakers and of learners of French will be analyzed phonetically and phonologically. Next, prosodic deviations (word-based trochaic patterns in French) will be studied in perception, involving native French speakers, monolingual German and Turkish learners and German-Turkish bilingual learners of French. The perception experiment will be conducted with simultaneous electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings in order to directly access the prosodic deviations effects. It is expected that all tested participants will show deviation effects, however, the magnitude thereof should differ, with native speakers showing the strongest and German speakers showing the weakest effects. An intervention, thought to heighten the prosodic awareness of the participants, is hypothesized to mitigate these effects, thereby improving perceptual skills in the learnt language. Altogether, this projects projects the topics of the research unit onto an applied language learning situation, assessing the need to unlearn characteristic prosodic patterns of the native language for second and third language learning.
Members
We are currently looking for Ph.D. candidates to work in this project:
Principal investigators
- Prof. Dr. Christoph Gabriel (Universität Mainz) - Ko-PI
External collaborators
- Prof. Dr. Sharon Peperkamp (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Paris)