2018 Alternate 6534

2018 Alternates | Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Categorical perception of lexical stress in French L2 learners of German: Effects of musical acuity
N. Boll-Avetisyan, S. Van Ommen, T. Nazzi, B. Höhle

Prior studies have suggested that native speakers of languages without lexical stress, such as French, are stress “deaf”: they have more difficulties encoding L2 lexical stress than speakers of languages with lexical stress, such as German, irrespective of L2 proficiency (Altmann, 2006, Dupoux et al 2008, Kijak 2009). Other studies have, however, indicated that stress perception by French listeners is subject to individual variability and relates, for example, to musicality (e.g., Boll-Avetisyan et al. 2016). To investigate whether difficulties in lexical encoding of stress are reflected in a differential perception of stress, and whether this perception can be influenced by musical acuity, the present study set out to explore the categorical perception (CP) of lexical stress in monolingual Germans and French, and French L2 learners (L2) of German.

Many prior studies have investigated CP of phonemes by monolinguals and L2 learners but the present study is the first to investigate CP of lexical stress. We predicted CP for monolingual speakers of German but not of French, and expected variability among L2 learners relating to musical acuity.

We created an 8-step lexical stress continuum of the nonword gaba from trochaic to iambic, for a discrimination task with AXB triplets (e.g. 1-1-3, 4-2-2), in which participants decided whether X was equal to A or B. Under CP, but not otherwise, accuracy (i.e., correct responses) should be enhanced if A and B belong to different categories (e.g. if A is a trochee and B an iamb). The MET (Wallentin et al. 2010) measured musical acuity.

For analysis, we used GAMMs (Wood 2006) to model the expected non-linear effects. Accuracy varied across the AB pairs, and AB pair interacted with group (the group factor improved the model fit; χ2 = 13.6, p < .01): Both German monolinguals and L2 learners were significantly more accurate than the French with AB pairs from the middle of the continuum (pairs 2-4, 3-5, and 4-6). This effect was, however, less pronounced in the L2 learners than the German monolinguals. Hence, L2 learners’ performance indicated CP, but it was intermediate between that of the two monolingual groups. Additional analyses revealed that rhythm acuity explains some of the variance (χ2 = 16.6, p < .001): Only L2 learners with lower rhythm acuity showed a peak in accuracy in the middle of the continuum, indicating CP. This outcome may relate to the nature of the discrimination task: Individuals with high auditory acuity performed high at perceiving subtle acoustic changes along the whole continuum, probably exactly because of their auditory skills. This does, however, not need to imply that they have not established separate categories for iambs and trochees.

Our results provide evidence that CP of lexical stress can be acquired by learning an L2. Moreover, they highlight the importance of considering individual differences among L2 learners for understanding how cognitive factors such as auditory acuity interact with phonology and task demands to shed more light on the mechanisms that guide L2 learning.