The Processing of Reduced Word Pronunciation Variants by Natives and Foreign Language Learners

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The Processing of Reduced Word Pronunciation Variants by Natives and Foreign Language Learners The processing of reduced word pronunciaton variants by natves and learners Evidence from French casual speech Sophie Brand 6 511381-L-os-brand Processed on: 14-7-2017 The processing of reduced word pronunciation variants by natives and foreign language learners Evidence from French casual speech 2017, Sophie Brand ISBN: 978-90-76203-87-4 Cover image: Jolijn Ceelen Printed and bound by Ipskamp Drukkers b.v. The processing of reduced word pronunciation variants by natives and foreign language learners Evidence from French casual speech Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J.H.J.M. van Krieken, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op woensdag 27 september 2017 om 16.30 uur precies door Sophie Wijnanda Maria Brand geboren op 25 augustus 1985 te Roermond Promotor: Prof. dr. M.T.C. Ernestus Copromotor: Dr. E. Janse Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. dr. R.W.N.M. van Hout Prof. dr. N. Warner (University of Arizona, Verenigde Staten) Dr. A. Bürki (Universität Potsdam, Duitsland) Prof. dr. H.M.G.M. Jacobs Dr. M.B.P. Starren The research reported in this dissertation was supported by a Consolidator grant from the European Research Council [grant number 284108] awarded to Prof. dr. M.T.C. Ernestus. ‘I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’. Isaac Newton, 1727. Contents 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Models of speech production ............................................................. 1 1.2 The nature of the processes underlying the absence of phonemes ... 3 1.3 Perception of reduced words by native listeners ............................... 6 1.4 Comprehension of reduced words by adult language learners .......... 9 1.5 Reduction in models of speech perception....................................... 12 1.6 Reduction in French .......................................................................... 14 1.7 Research questions ........................................................................... 16 1.8 Methods ............................................................................................ 17 1.9 Outline ............................................................................................... 21 2. Reduction of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in casual European French 23 2.1 Introduction ...................................................................................... 24 2.2 Methods ............................................................................................ 33 2.3. Results .............................................................................................. 37 2.4. General discussion ........................................................................... 56 Appendix ................................................................................................. 66 3. The use of contextual cues and of variant frequency in the comprehension of reduced speech by highly proficient language learners 67 3.1 Introduction....................................................................................... 68 3.2 Experiment 1 ..................................................................................... 75 3.2.1 Methods .................................................................................... 75 3.2.2 Results ....................................................................................... 78 3.3 Experiment 2 ..................................................................................... 83 vii 3.3.1 Methods ............................................................................... 83 3.3.2 Results .................................................................................. 89 3.4 Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 ........................................................ 95 3.5 General discussion ............................................................................. 95 Appendix A ............................................................................................. 103 Appendix B ............................................................................................. 105 4. Listeners’ processing of a given reduced word pronunciation variant directly reflects their exposure to this variant: Evidence from native listeners and learners of French 107 4.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 108 4.2 Experiment 1 .................................................................................... 117 4.2.1 Methods .................................................................................. 117 4.2.2 Results ..................................................................................... 121 4.3 Experiment 2 .................................................................................... 127 4.3.1 Methods .................................................................................. 127 4.3.2 Results ..................................................................................... 129 4.4 Experiment 3 .................................................................................... 137 4.4.1 Methods .................................................................................. 137 4.4.2 Results ..................................................................................... 139 4.5 General discussion ........................................................................... 146 Appendices ............................................................................................ 156 5. Processing reduced speech in the L1 and L2: A combined eye-tracking and ERP study 165 5.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 166 5.2 Methods ........................................................................................... 171 5.3 Results .............................................................................................. 178 5.4 General discussion ........................................................................... 186 viii 6. General discussion and conclusions 193 6.1 Gradient versus categorical reduction ............................................ 193 6.2 The effect of reduction on natives’ and learners’ word recognition ............................................................................................ 199 6.3 Variants’ frequency effects ............................................................. 204 6.4 Psycholinguistic models .................................................................. 211 6.5 Methodology ................................................................................... 217 6.6 Recommendations for foreign language teachers .......................... 219 6.7 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 220 Nederlandse samenvatting 221 References 235 Acknowledgements 253 Curriculum Vitae 257 MPI series in psycholinguistics 259 List of publications 271 ix Introduction Chapter 1 In everyday casual speech, words are often produced with fewer or lenited segments compared to their citation forms. In American English, the word hilarious [hɪlɛriʌs], for instance, may be pronounced as something like [hlɛrɛs]. This phenomenon, called reduction, is highly frequent (e.g., for Dutch, Ernestus, 2000; for English, Johnson, 2004; Greenberg, 1999; Shattuck-Hufnagel & Veilleux, 2007; for Finnish, Lennes, Alaroty & Vainio, 2001; for French, Adda- Decker, Boula de Mareüil, Adda & Lamel, 2005; for German, Kohler, 1990; for Russian, Van Son, Bolotova, Lennes & Pols, 2004). In French, /ǝ/ in, for instance, renard ‘fox’, is absent in more than 50.0% of the word tokens (e.g., Fougeron, Goldman & Frauenfelder, 2001; Hansen, 1994), and word-final /ǝ/ in, for instance, théâtre ‘theatre’, has been reported to be absent in 35.0% of the monosyllabic word tokens and in 90.0% of the polysyllabic word tokens (Adda- Decker, Boula de Mareüil & Lamel, 1999). Despite the ubiquity of reduction in everyday speech, little is known about how speakers produce and comprehend reduced words. The aim of this dissertation is to examine in more detail how natives and foreign language learners process reduced word pronunciation variants. 1.1 Models of speech production A much debated question is whether reduced word pronunciation variants are stored in the mental lexicon. There is a continuum of speech production accounts differing in their assumptions about the degree to which phonetic variation is represented in lexical memory. The models at one end of the continuum assume that the pronunciation of each word is stored as a single abstract representation (e.g., Roelofs, 1997). During production, application of 1 a phonological deletion rule (e.g., schwa-deletion rule, see McCarthy & Prince, 1993; Chomsky & Halle, 1968) transforms the lexically stored, unreduced variant (e.g., /ʀǝvy/ revue ‘magazine’) into a reduced variant (e.g., /ʀvy/). A reduced variant may also result from articulatory processes operating on the stored unreduced pronunciation variant. The results of an articulatory study on American English by Browman and Goldstein (1990) illustrate that there are (many) realisations of the word in which a consonant is articulatory present, but where
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