Does Training Make French Speakers More Able to Identify Lexical Stress?

Sandra Schwab, Joaquim Llisterri
2014 Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech Concordia Working Papers in Applied Linguistics   unpublished
The aim of this research is to determine whether a prosodic training could improve the ability of French-speaking listeners to identify the stressed syllable in Spanish words. For this, native speakers of French and native speakers of Spanish performed a pre-test and a post-test, involving a stress identification task. Between both tests, some of the French speakers participated in a training session, in which they were trained to perceive Spanish accentual contrasts, while the others received
more » ... o training. Firstly, results show that, although their performance does not reach those of native speakers of Spanish, French-speaking listeners are able, after a short training, to learn to perceive Spanish accentual contrasts. More interestingly, results also reveal that the improvement from pre-to post-test does not depend on the mere fact of receiving training, but rather depends on the French-speaking listenerʹs learning ability in the training session.
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