Assessing L2 phonemic acquisition: a normalisation-independent method?
Résumé
This paper aims at addressing the issues that
emerge when attempting to analyse the acquisition
of L2 vowels: studies usually embed vowels in the
same /hVd/ template (e.g. Hillenbrand [14], Fer-
ragne [10], Clopper [9]) in order to reduce coartic-
ulatory effects, and the number of occurrences of
each vowel is carefully controlled in order to comply
with normalization constraints (e.g. Lobanov [17]).
However, such methods make it difficult to test the
predictions of SLA models that base phonemic ac-
quisition on phonemic parameters only (Flege [11],
Best [2],[3]). This study investigates the develop-
ment of advanced French learners for the acquisi-
tion of phonemic contrasts (
/I-i:/
and
/U-u:/
) in the
longitudinal D
IDEROT
L
ONGDALE
[13] corpus. 15
speakers (12 female & 3 male) were recorded in
spontaneous interviews over a period of two years.
To test whether the acquisitions of the
/I-i:/
and
/U-
u:/
constrasts are similar, a metric, the Ratio of the
(contrast) DIstance to the vowel space Convex Hull
(RaDiCHull,
/rÊd.Ik."h2l/
), is explored with differ-
ent normalizing procedures to measure learner input
as compared to native speakers of English (the refer-
ence points are from Hillenbrand [14] for values in
Hz, and from Clopper [9] for values in Bark)