Acquiring Phrasing and Intonation in French as Second Language: the Case of Yes-No Questions Produced by Mexican Spanish Learners

In this paper, we propose a study of the final contours and the prosodic structure observed in yes-no questions in French as an L2. Our study consists in a cross-comparison of utterances recorded in French and Spanish in various settings, and produced by 15 Mexican Spanish learners of French (L2), 10 French speakers and 10 Mexican speakers. In the learner s’ productions, the intonational structure obtained may display some characteristics of their L1: (i) the final contour consists in an extra-high F0 rise, and (ii) the internal prosodic structure at the level of the Prosodic Word (PWD) is not clearly marked. By contrast, in the utterances realized by the French native speakers, it is clear that the form of the final contour is less important than phrasing. These findings prove that the acquisition of phrasing is more important than the acquisition of tonal patterns in French as an L2.