The relation between pitch accent types, head movements and perceived prosodic prominence in L2 French

Abstract

Recent research has shown the relevance of multimodal cues in the realization of prominence in discourse. Speakers may not only use prosodic cues - e.g. pitch accents - to stress important information but also visual cues - e.g., manual and non-manual gestures such as head movements - in synchrony. As part of a larger project comparing the multimodal marking of information structure by L1 and L2 speakers, this study reports on the relationship between perceived prominence in L2 speech and the pitch accent and head movement types used by 25 Catalan learners of French during a narrative task. Results confirm the relationship between pitch accents, gestural cues, and prosodic prominence in L2 learners and show that higher prosodic prominence is associated with rising, falling, and high pitch accents as well as with protrusions and nods of the head. Falling contours associated with highly prominent words were less marked by head movements, indicating potential differences from L1 speech.