The effects of prosodic training with logatomes and prosodic gestures on L2 spontaneous speech
Résumé
Training L2 suprasegmental features benefits pronunciation accuracy and comprehensibility, especially through the use of hand gestures. However, studies have mainly looked at the effect of prosodic training in controlled tasks and less is known about spontaneous speech. The present study explores the effect of prosodic training with and without gestures depicting prosody on several dimensions of pronunciation in spontaneous speech.
Fifty Catalan learners of French practiced oral reading and sentence-by-sentence imitation with short dialogues during three 30-minute sessions in one of three conditions: speech- only, repeating a selection of sentences from the dialogues; logatome, repeating logatome sequences (series of same consonant-vowel syllable leaving out lexical information) corresponding to the prosody of target sentences; and logatome+gesture, additionally mimicking gestures representing phrasal prosodic patterns.
Perceptive evaluations of learners’ spontaneous speech at pre- and posttest revealed that training prosody did not have any significant effect on participants’ comprehensibility, accentedness, and suprasegmental accuracy in spontaneous speech. Acoustic analyses further showed null effects of prosodic training on fluency and the pronunciation of difficult vowel contrasts. Our findings suggest that L2 prosodic training should be better tailored for spontaneous speech. Alternatively, learners may need more time to transfer beneficial effects from controlled tasks to spontaneous speech.
Domaines
Sciences de l'Homme et Société
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