Main Content

WE 6: Sensitivity to reduced syllables in learners of German as L2 and implications for grammatical learning

The main objective of the present project is to investigate the sensitivity to different types of German reduced syllables ([ə] and [ɐ]) in contrast to full vowels in adult learners of German with Italian, French, and Turkish as L1 and whether these learner groups can use reduced vowels to en-/decode grammatical meanings in morphological paradigms. It has been suggested within the framework of Prosodic Morphology that the canonical trochee (a strong syllable followed by a reduced one, like in [ˈbeːtə] (English ‘beds’), plays an important role in German plural forms that typically end in a canonical trochee. Whether the sensitivity to reduced syllables is a prerequisite to acquire the German plural morphology will be tested in foreign-language learners of German whose L1s systematically differ from the target language German: (1) Italian, which is trochaic but lacks reduced vowels, (2) French, which is non-trochaic but includes schwa in its phoneme system, and (3) Turkish, which is non-trochaic and lacks reduced vowels. We aim to determine how such learners categorize the German reduced vowels [ə] and [ɐ] in contrast to full vowels and whether they are able to produce and comprehend final reduced syllables in plural formation. 

To investigate the sensitivity of three groups of monolingually raised students from Italy, France, and Türkiye to reduced syllables and their function in German plurals, we will collect production data and perform two electrophysiological perception studies. In both strands of research, we will test how i) vowel contrasts between reduced vowels and between reduced and full vowels are produced and perceived and ii) prosodic conditions on plural forms produced and evaluated. In order to study the learners’ production abilities, the acoustic characteristics of vowels realized in read, elicited, and semi-spontaneous speech will be analyzed, also in words of a plural task. In addition, the learners’ proficiency will be evaluated in a rating task performed by German native listeners. In the perception experiments, participants will first be confronted with different vowels pairs contrasting either reduced and full vowels or the two vowels [ə] and [ɐ] to test whether the different learner groups show distinctive sensitivities to reduced vowels. In a second perception task, learners will be confronted with correct and incorrect plural forms to test their sensitivity to the prosodic restriction on plural formation. We will further correlate the learners’ perception of reduced syllables with their ability to produce them and to fulfil prosodic requirements on grammatical words in language production, a link also suggested in the Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis (Demuth 2019). Taken together, the proposed project will investigate the acquisition of prosodic restrictions on morphological operations all the way up from the capacity to categorize reduced vowels to the application of prosodic constraints in plural formation.