LINGUIST List 18.2355
Tue Aug 07 2007
Diss: Lang Acquisition/Phonology/Psycholing: Tremblay: 'Bridging th...'
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1. Annie
Tremblay,
Bridging the Gap Between Theoretical Linguistics and Psycholinguistics in L2 Phonology: Acquisition and processing of word stress by French Canadian L2 learners of English
Message 1: Bridging the Gap Between Theoretical Linguistics and Psycholinguistics in L2 Phonology: Acquisition and processing of word stress by French Canadian L2 learners of English
Date: 31-Jul-2007
From: Annie Tremblay <atremblauiuc.edu>
Subject: Bridging the Gap Between Theoretical Linguistics and Psycholinguistics in L2 Phonology: Acquisition and processing of word stress by French Canadian L2 learners of English
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Institution: University of Hawaii
Program: Second Language Acquisition
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2007
Author: Annie Tremblay
Dissertation Title: Bridging the Gap Between Theoretical Linguistics and Psycholinguistics in L2 Phonology: Acquisition and processing of word stress by French Canadian L2 learners of English
Dissertation URL: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/atrembla/home/dissertation.htm
Linguistic Field(s):
Language Acquisition
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Dissertation Director:
Robert Bley-Vroman
Heather Goad
William O'Grady
Amy J. Schafer
Bonnie D. Schwartz
Dissertation Abstract:
This study attempts to bridge the gap between theoretical linguistics andpsycholinguistics in second language (L2) phonology by investigating theacquisition and processing of word stress by French Canadian L2 learners ofEnglish. It assumes a constraint-based view of prosodic phonology and iscouched within the Autonomous Induction Theory (Carroll, 2001). Its purposeis to reach a better understanding of the interaction between theacquisition of L2 grammatical knowledge (e.g., the creation of alignmentrelations between the prosodic constituents in a representation) and thedevelopment of L2 parsing procedures (e.g., the selection ofcorrespondences between representations at different levels—acoustic,prosodic, and lexical).
French Canadian L2 learners of English at three proficiency levels(intermediate, n=29; low-advanced, n=29; high-advanced, n=18) and nativespeakers of English (n=31) completed four experiments targeting theacoustic perception of stress (AXB perception task), the acquisition of thetrochaic (i.e., stressed-unstressed) foot and the alignment of its headwith heavy (i.e., bimoraic) syllables (nonsense-word production task), theuse of stress in word recognition (cross-modal word identification task),and the relationship between knowledge of (surface) stress placement anduse of stress in word recognition (vocabulary production task).
The results reveal that all the L2 learners could perceive stressacoustically, and most had acquired the trochaic foot, but they generallyfailed to align the head of the foot with heavy syllables. The L2 learners'productions (nonsense-word and vocabulary production tasks) suggest thatthey instead aligned the trochaic foot with the left edge of the word, inpart (it is argued) because of the overwhelming occurrence of word-initialstress in English (Clopper, 2002). The results also show that several L2learners were able to use stress to recognize English words, but those whoused an iambic foot in English (production task) or who produced incorrectstress patterns (vocabulary production task) failed to do so, therebysuggesting an implicational relationship between target-like knowledge offoot structure and processing of stress.
These findings indicate a tight connection between the acquisition of L2grammatical knowledge and the development of L2 parsing procedures, withthe former being necessary for (but not guaranteeing) the latter.
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